Sixty second philosophy: rationalism and empiricism

Most philosophers fall in between rationalism and empiricism. However, behind empiricism we typically have Hume, Locke, and Berkeley; while Leibniz, Descartes, and Spinoza make up the rationalist side.

I think it’s in Meditations II where Descartes uses the example of a piece of wax to illustrate his logic for why he thinks we can only come to true knowledge through the use of pure reason. His argument is essentially that we can experience the wax, touch, taste, see, etc. and we gain what we perceive as knowledge of that wax. But, we then melt the wax and all of those properties we originally attributed to that piece of wax are no longer correct. It’s the same piece of wax, but for Descartes, this change has proven that we cannot come to have knowledge of the wax through our senses. We can think we are perceiving the piece of wax, but for all we know it could be a hallucination or dream.

It becomes really interesting when you get into specific arguments of each side. So, for instance, Descartes has his arguments for the existence of God and other metaphysical theories which he asserts he can know through reason alone (I’ll take you through his arguments for the existence of God one day), but then we have others, like Hume who would reject this.

This itself causes some issues for metaphysics and whether we can actually “know” anything about it - metaphysical claims can’t be empirical because then it would no longer be in the realm of metaphysics, but we can’t really know it through pure #reason either. (It’s like a paradox, that’s my personal favourite)

Morality is technically outside of this too as it relies on value beyond experience, hence the is vs ought thing. Empirical knowledge of how something is cannot translate into how it ought to be. We can’t get there on the rationalist side of things, either, though. If they claim that morals are an objective obligation they’d need to prove that these values exist independently in the world.

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