Rationalists Vs. Empiricists: The Question of Innate Ideas

By; Matthew Ryan

Two major schools of thought in philosophy are empiricism and rationalism. Adherents of empiricism include the famous philosopher David Hume and to a lesser extent George Berkeley. Rationalism, on the other hand, was supported by such men as Rene Descartes and John Locke.
The central tenet of empiricism is that what an individual knows must be grounded in sensory experience. Color, shape, sound, and number are all derived from sensory perceptions. And, according to empiricists, that is all we can ever hope to have knowledge of or study. The intent of empiricists is quite benign: it arose as a reaction to Cartesian dualism, a theory that supported a separate external world about which we could have no knowledge. Empiricists cut off this mysterious external world from study. Similarly, they did away with Plato's Theory of Forms and other such extraneous concepts. For an empiricist, the famous question "How many angels can fit on the head of a pin" is a useless inquiry without an answer. So too, are inquiries which are not based strictly on sensory experience.