Could someone help me for an essay on rationalism vs empiricism?

hey, I'm writing a basic persuasive essay for my grade 9 English class and decided to do it on Rationalism vs Empiricism arguing for the rationalists. My thesis is basically "All knowledge is obtained through thought and reason not through sensory and experience." I need three arguments that i could write about to prove that. If you could give me a few it would greatly be appreciated. thanks.

Could someone help me for an essay on rationalism vs empiricism?
I'm not going to give you too much, because you should do homework on your own. However, here are a few things to get you started:





1) Look up a book called "Meditations" by a philosopher named Rene Descartes. In particular, look at the Second Meditation. It's the one where he makes his famous "I think, therefore I am" statement. What Descartes is touching on there is the idea of "a priori" knowledge. (Essentially that means "knowledge gained using only the mind, or exactly what you're trying to argue for.)





2) Think about examples in which the senses prove fallible. You could print out some famous visual illusions from the internet, and use those in support of your paper. It will help plant doubts about the reliability of sensory information, and you can spend some time discussing that in your paper.





3) Realize that 90% of the world believes in God, even though there is NO empirical evidence to prove His existence (insofar as we can't actually SEE God. I understand that people have claimed to feel or see the manifestations of God, but most people don't even go that far.) There is a strong argument to be made here, simply on the basis that if 90% of the world believes in this way, then 90% of the world must be rationalist rather than empiricist. They would never believe in God, otherwise.





Hope that helps...
Reply:Each, the rationalists and the empiricists, are about 1/2 right and 1/2 wrong. Put the 2 "right" halves of their philosophies together and you'd have a pretty solid philosophy.





"[Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists)."


“For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual, 30





"Throughout its history, philosophy has been torn by the conflict between the rationalists and the empiricists. The former stress the role of logic in man's acquisition of knowledge, while minimizing the role of experience; the latter claim that experience is the source of man's knowledge, while minimizing the role of logic. This split between logic and experiences is institutionalized in the theory of the analytic synthetic dichotomy."


Ayn Rand: "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology"; p. 112





"...the “analytic-synthetic” dichotomy which, by a route of tortuous circumlocutions and equivocations, leads to the dogma that a “necessarily” true proposition cannot be factual, and a factual proposition cannot be “necessarily” true.


Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 102.





"Objectivism rejects the theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy as false—in principle, at root, and in every one of its variants %26amp;hellip.





An analytic proposition is defined as one which can be validated merely by an analysis of the meaning of its constituent concepts. The critical question is: What is included in “the meaning of a concept”? Does a concept mean the existents which it subsumes, including all their characteristics? Or does it mean only certain aspects of these existents, designating some of their characteristics but excluding others?





The latter viewpoint is fundamental to every version of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. The advocates of this dichotomy divide the characteristics of the existents subsumed under a concept into two groups: those which are included in the meaning of the concept, and those—the great majority—which, they claim, are excluded from its meaning. The dichotomy among propositions follows directly. If a proposition links the “included” characteristics with the concept, it can be validated merely by an “analysis” of the concept; if it links the “excluded” characteristics with the concept, it represents an act of “synthesis.”


Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,”


Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 127.





Rationalism: A method, or very broadly, a theory of philosophy, in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive. Usually associated with an attempt to introduce mathematical methods into philosophy, as in Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.





Empiricism, Radical: The theory of knowledge which holds that ideas are reducible to sensations, as in Hume (1711-1776). The doctrine that experience is the final criterion of reality in knowledge. Synonomous with sensationalistic empiricism or sensationalism.


http://www.ditext.com/runes/index.html

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