Rationalism vs Empiricism

tags
Epistemology Empiricism

“In its most general terms, the dispute between rationalism and empiricism has been taken to concern the extent to which we are dependent upon experience in our effort to gain knowledge of the external world.”1

I think that there isn't really an important disagreement here, and that the dispute arises from a spurious distinction between internal and external worlds. OTOH the SEP points out that even the most famous rationalists or empiricists were not purists about it, so even the ostensible disputants are not really that mad at each other. However, this dispute or its echoes come up a lot in Western philosophy. See e.g. theory vs practice, Apollonian and Dionysian

Footnotes:

1

Peter Markie and M. Folescu, “Rationalism Vs. Empiricism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Spring 2023 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/rationalism-empiricism/.