Case Study On Kant's Answer To The Rationalist-Empiricist Dispute

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism is found within a branch of philosophy called epistemology, is all about the extent to which humans are dependent on sense experience in the quest to acquire knowledge. Rationalists think that there are ways with which our concepts and knowledge can be gained independently of sense experience. On the other hand, empiricists think that sense experience is the only source of all concepts and knowledge. But Immanuel Kant sought to give a solution and therefore solve the dispute between these two arguments.
Kant argues that the method and the content found in these two schools of thought are seriously flawed. He further points out that empiricism fell into skepticism while rationalism into dogmatism. He came up with a new view of the two where he fused them and came up with a proposition that if one has to obtain true knowledge, then one has got to start by analyzing how experience can amount to knowledge.
He worked so hard to unify empiricism and rationalism by arguing that experience contributes greatly to acquisition of knowledge. He also says that correct knowledge should have universal validity. Here Kant means that cognition can only start with experience and therefore, ‘a priori form of cognition’ which can also be referred to as concepts can only exist within cognition and this can only be established if the sensory content comes from the object and is put in order by a priori forms of the subject. His major concern was to establish how objective truthfulness is obtainable. According to him, cognition is judgment and judgment is made up of proposition and a proposition made up of a subject and predicate. Knowledge will then increase through a judgment and therefore knowledge obtainable through synthetic judgment and experience.