PHI 1103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Cambridge Platonists, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan
19 Apr 2016
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What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet, which bears no actual writing; this is just what happens in the case of the mind . Nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses . For every thought comes from sense-perception or not without sense-perception and either from a direct experience or not without direct experience . Human intellect at birth resembled a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know . Empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts . Empiricism: empiricism, unlike rationalism that claimed that the mind is furnished with certain innate ideas, argues that the sense are the primary source of all knowledge. Mind compared to a tabula rasa, or a blank slate reason and knowledge gained through experiences experience = observation via the senses plus the mind"s subsequent reflection on the data acquired.
