Today's soundtrack is Angels and Airwaves: We Don't Need to Whisper.
This morning's reading is chapter 3 of Coles Philosophy Questions and Answers, "Rationalism and Empiricism: The Epistemological Problem."
Epistemology is "the study of knowledge" (p. 10); it is one of the foundations of philosophy. Epistemology is the theory about what knowledge is, how much knowledge man can attain (if any), what the source of knowledge is, and whether knowledge is absolute or relative. It converges with discussions and theories about metaphysics, since "[m]etaphysics is concerned with reality, while epistemology deals with the knowledge of that reality" (p. 10). The three major schools of epistemology are rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism. Rationalists believe "that truth is derived from reason without the necessity of referring to experience" (p. 10), while empiricists believe "that all knowledge derives from experience" (p. 10). Skeptics believe that one cannot know what to believe.
There are two major branches of the intersectionality of metaphysics and epistemology: "epistemological idealism [and the] opposite view[, ...] epistemological realism" (p. 10). Epistemological idealism is the belief that the things that a person senses cannot exist unless he is also conscious of them, but epistemological realism states that "objects exist independently of man's mind and experience of them" (p. 10). Bertrand Russell found an interesting third theory: he believed that there are two kinds of knowledge, "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description" (p. 10). G. E. Moore calls knowledge by acquaintance "actually seeing" (p. 12).
Descartes, a rationalist, is famously quoted as saying "I think, therefore I am" (p. 10). He believed that knowledge is innate.
John Locke, an empiricist, held to Aristotle's position that "[t]here is nothing in the mind which was not first in the senses" (p. 10). For empiricists, only a thing that can be experienced can exist; thus "reality, the soul, God, matter, [and] causation" (p. 12) cannot exist.
Immanuel Kant established synthetic philosophy, a fusion of empiricism and rationalism. He believed that knowledge is acquired by using reason to process the realities experienced by the senses, and that applying reason to concepts that can't be experienced is meaningless. Along with his synthetic philosophy came the distinction between analytic judgement (one that is redundant because it is self-explanatory), and synthetic judgement (a statement that contributes something new).
The final piece of epistemology was the establisment of the Hegelian Dialectic, in which Hegel states "that a thesis is reconciled with its antithesis in order to produce [...] a synthesis" (p. 12).
