We encounter the world through our senses; but does what we sense delineate what we think? Isn’t it possible to conceive some things that I could never confront via sensation? We experience the world as something more or less understood, but does recognising what we see, taste, touch, hear or smell involve nothing more than submitting ourselves to stimuli? How much do we contribute to the way the world appears to us in experience? How could mere conglomerates of sensation yield the principles we use to judge anything? Perhaps these guiding principles are not derived from, but known independently of, experience. If these principles are grasped a priori, then do they track the way the world is or just articulate the way the world appears to me?
These issues assumed centre stage in the debate between rationalism and empiricism, but have a longer history and are still central concerns in contemporary philosophy. The problems addressed in this unit are developed and recast throughout the specification, but they find particular focus in the epistemology and metaphysics option at A2 as well as in the texts Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Plato’s Republic, Descartes’ Meditations and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
The issues to be covered are:
Mind as a tabula rasa
- The strengths and weaknesses of the view that all ideas are derived from sense experience.
- The strengths and weaknesses of the view that claims about what exists must be ultimately grounded in and justified by sense experience.
Innate knowledge
- The strengths and weaknesses of the view that the mind contains innate knowledge regarding the way the world is: the doctrine of innate ideas and its philosophical significance.
- The view that some fundamental claims about what exists can be grounded in and justified by a priori intuition and/or demonstration.
- Is ‘certainty’ confined to introspection and the tautological?
- The idea that experience is only intelligible as it is, because it presents sensation through a predetermined conceptual scheme or framework; and the philosophical implications of this view.
In covering these issues, students will be expected to demonstrate their understanding of the contrasts and connections between necessary and contingent truths, analytic and synthetic propositions, deductive and inductive arguments, a priori and a posteriori knowledge.
