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4 ideas
| 23312 | Aristotle is a rationalist, but reason is slowly acquired through perception and experience [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is a rationalist …but reason for him is a disposition which we only acquire over time. Its acquisition is made possible primarily by perception and experience. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Michael Frede - Aristotle's Rationalism p.173 | |
| A reaction: I would describe this process as the gradual acquisition of the skill of objectivity, which needs the right knowledge and concepts to evaluate new experiences. |
| 4302 | You may experience a universal truth, but only reason can tell you that it is always true [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: However often one experiences instances of a universal truth, one could never know inductively that it would always hold unless one knew through reason that it was necessary. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: The problem, though, is that as soon as we go beyond experience we are not very reliable, and are liable to arrogance, error and lack of imagination. |
| 12947 | We only believe in sensible things when reason helps the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The senses could not convince us of the existence of sensible things without help from reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This nicely pinpoints the big difficulty which keeps besetting orthodox empiricism. I've been educated as an empiricist, but I prefer Leibniz to Berkeley or Hume, and even to the more sensible Locke. |
| 12930 | The senses are confused, and necessities come from distinct intellectual ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Intellectual ideas, from which necessary truths arise, do not come from the senses. ...The ideas that come from the senses are confused; and so too, at least in part, are the truths which depend on them, whereas intellectual ideas are distinct. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: One might compare Descartes' example of the chiliagon, which is only grasped clearly by the intellect. However, the problem of vagueness seems to intrude as much into intellectual ideas as it does into the senses. He was a mathematician... |