Response to this blog post:
In response to your point about John Locke, often called the founder of British Empiricism, while Empiricism has both strengths and weaknesses it could be challenged, in so far as It is difficult to claim that what we experience through our senses is the fundamental root of all our perceptions and understanding.. One factor is that Empiricism relies heavily on the senses for attaining truths. The senses are not always functioning perfectly, surely injury to the brain or alcohol could alter their validity and lead to a distortion of the truth. A second argument against Empiricism is that the truths arriving need to be organized and not disconnected. It is difficult to ascertain how this organization can occur.
Traditional empiricist methods need to be supplemented by extra-logical principals that are not strictly empirical.[1] Empiricism cannot provide us with the certainty of scientific knowledge in the sense that it denies the existence of objective reality, ignores the dialectical relationship of the subjective and objective contents of knowledge.[2] Our sensuous intuitions have to be structured by something inherent in our minds. Differing from Locke, Kant asserts that our minds are not originally like blank slates although our minds may be empty of sensory content before experience begins they nonetheless have a prior structure that gives shape to the sensory experience.[3] Another view, generally associated with Plato (Republic 479e-484c) locates the superiority of a priori knowledge in objects known. What we know by reason alone, a Pllatonic form, say, is superior in an important metaphysical way, e.g. unchanging, eternal, perfect, a higher degree of being, to what we are aware of through sense experience.[4].
