A dispute · spans 1 era
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Where does knowledge come from — reason or experience?
The defining controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries. Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) argued that the deepest knowledge — mathematics, the principles of being — comes from pure reason; the senses are unreliable. Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) argued that all knowledge ultimately derives from sense experience; reason only rearranges what experience supplied. The dispute was effectively dissolved (or transformed) by Kant, who argued that both sides were right: experience supplies the material, but the mind supplies the form.
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