A Re-reading of Western Philosophy - 1

Over thirty years ago, when I was a research student at the Delhi University, I used to browse through various books on Western Philosophy for which I had a passing interest. I seemed to have got familiar with some of the ideas of philosophers like Plato, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza and a few others too, but these ideas were largely lost to me as I had not kept up with my readings and had not nourished the incipient curiosity that I had. Since yesterday I've been re-reading some of these aspects from a very basic book and I now feel like recording my shallow and rambling thoughts in this blog which, in fact, is meant for such a shallow pursuit.

As I was reading the chapter on John Locke I was struck by what the book says about Locke - that all knowledge is gained from experience. As has been explained Locke was a British 'Empiricist' who together with George Berkeley and David Hume generally thought that all knowledge must come directly or indirectly from the experience of the world that we acquire through our senses alone.

This contrasts with the Rationalist philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Benedictus Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz who hold that in principle, at least, it is possible to acquire knowledge solely through reason.

In this sort of debate I am tempted to side with the rationalists because of what I have learnt from the advances in physics in the 20th Century.

For instance, many of the conditions that Einstein visualised in his theories of relativity are never in the ambit of general human experience. We never travel at such high velocities; we never experience such high gravitational fields; we never experience those physical conditions, and yet Einstein and his associates could predict the curvature of space-time around massive bodies. He could predict that starlight would be bent as it travels to the earth by grazing the Sun. Other effects of time distortions are proved in high energy particle accelerators where the decay times of subatomic particles are found to slow down at high velocities.

All these were the fruits of Man's Reason as contrasted with his experiences or sometimes were even counter-intuitive. Even the prediction of the existence of a positron by Paul Andre Maurice Dirac. He used his famous Delta Function to predict the existence of a positron which was detected only later!

So all these instances seem to indicate that humans can glean out knowledge by the use of rational faculties alone.