Reflection: Empiricism

Reflection: Empiricism

This essay will talk about my opinion about this topic. “experience is the one and only source of information about the world” I think that with no experience you could not talk with no one about a topic. What if this philosopher start talking about something you have not been through and you have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, I would feel really embarrased. In this next paragraphs I will prove that philosophers agree with experience.

John Locke says that when we are born our minds are like blankslates, he is trying to say that no human being is born with experience, everyone has to experience something in their lifes ones. Of course we fill the blackboards by sense of experience

David Hume offered two arguments for empiricism. The first is called the Hume’s challenge, this consists of taking any idea that you have and try to think in the past experiences. He bet that we can trace it to some set of experiences or as he named

“impressions”. Some might think what about the idea of God? Well Hume anticipated that question and he says that the idea of God simply comes from reflecting on our own good qualities, such as charity and amplifying them without limit. The second argument for empiricism is called the Molineux problem which is that if a blind person learned to recognize objects just by touch, if he could recover his sight he couldn’t recognize them just by watching them.

Not all Philosophers had the same thinking of the British trio, for example Rene Descartes (which is a very famous known most by his phrase “I think therefore I am”) he thought that there was at least one idea that could have neither made up nor derived from experience. That idea is God, conceived as infinitively and powerful, Descartes is correct that the idea of infinitely cannot come directly from experience, because everything that we experience is finite.

So in conclusion on Philosophy, as in all others sciences, there are a lot points of view and in this case Locke and Descartes both have certain truth, but is up to us to choose in what to believe. We have to remember that when these men lived the world was different; science as it is now didn’t exist. So their points of view are very profound and very impressive.