Aquila Children's Magazine AQUILA Magazine Best Bits | Page 69

Philip and Phoebe have stumbled
across one of the biggest arguments
in the whole of philosophy. At issue
are two fundamental questions:
‘What can we know?’ Philosophers are divided into two
‘How can we know it?’ rationalists and the empiricists.
and
RAtIoNaLiStS
warring camps on this issue: the
EMpIrIcIsTs
The rationalists believe in the unlimited power of human
reason to discover all the secrets of the Universe. We discover
truth by sitting and thinking hard about it, they
suggest, not by going and looking at things. René
Descartes (1596–1650) was a very important
rationalist philosopher, and his famous ‘I think,
therefore I am’ sums up their position neatly. The empiricists deny this. They believe the scope of
reason is very limited. The real source of all knowledge, they
argue, is sense experience: the information that comes to
us through our eyes and ears, touch, taste and
smell. Reason can merely rearrange this raw
material into different patterns; it cannot
create anything completely new.
Rationalists also believe in the unlimited power
of human imagination to create completely
novel ideas. Just as some people believe that
God created the world out of nothing,
rationalists believe that the human imagination
can create brand new ideas where nothing was there before. David Hume (1711–1776) was a very important
empiricist philosopher. He gave the example of
The Golden Mountain. We can visualise the
golden mountain only by combining the
ideas of ‘golden’ and ‘mountain’ with which
we are already familiar from sense experience.
KAnT
IMaGiNaTiOn aNd tHe UNiVeRsE
Kant’s position is relevant to Philip and Phoebe’s
discussion. Phoebe wants to know what was there
‘before’ the Big Bang, but Philip replies that there
was no ‘before’ because time started just then.
‘Before’ the Big Bang is exactly the sort of zone
beyond any possible sense experience that Kant
talked about. And here, reason and imagination
simply do not work. The only words and ideas we
can use in this zone are words and ideas
related to our sense experience: ‘time’ and ‘before’
are both like this. So if we try to use them in that
other zone they fail to grip and just generate
nonsense. In situations like this we must simply
give up in silence and ignorance.
So, if Kant is right, yes, Phoebe does lack the
imagination to think about these issues. But then
so too does Philip – despite what he thinks –
along with the rest of us!
ExTrA TrIcKy qUeStIoNs fOr bUdDiNg pHiLoSoPhErS
1 Can you make up an imaginary 2 We are unhappy with the idea of 3 Which is better at finding the truth:
creature whose parts are not derived events happening for no reason at all, doing science experiments, or thinking
from your past sense experience? If and will always look for a cause or hard about problems?
not, why not? reason for everything. Why?
Phoebe illustrations:
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) combined these positions in a novel and
compelling way. Reason is enormously powerful, he argued, but only when applied to the
information supplied by our senses. If it strays beyond, into places where experience can
never occur, it simply freewheels like car tyres spinning on an icy road. He called his 1781
book on this topic the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘pure’ reason being reason which wrongly
fancies itself imaginative but is in fact just generating nonsense.