Response 1.
When people believe in the fact that all knowledge is a resultant of experience and in particular sensory experience, they tend to base their ideas on empiricism. According to a group of philosophers who are British, the notion of innate ideas that asserts that every idea was came about as a result of experience. Empiricists are those individuals who claim that experience is the origin of all knowledge. Hobbes was a mechanist empiricist as well as materialistic since he asserted that all activities of human beings were in due course reducible to mechanistic and materialistic. Also, Hobbes believed in the idea that most of the functions that are offered by the society are normally purposed to provide satisfaction to the needs of members of the society as well prevent conflicts amongst themselves. He also claimed that the behavior that is exhibited by a human is as a result of the urge to attain pleasure as well as to avoid pain.
Similar to British empiricists, the sensationalists who are French belief experience to be the source of all ideas. For instance, sensationalists can be materialistic in the notion that they believe they deny that material events exist. On the other hand, sensationalists can be referred as mechanists in that they believe that the laws of association and simple sensation are utilized in explaining all material events. According to Gassendi, the idea of Descartes that the division of an individual into a nonmaterial mind and material body was trivial. He said that all the mental events did not result from the mind rather from the heart. Similar to Hobbes’s ideas, Gassendi established that exists such as all human being aspects are matter (Hergenhahn, Baldwin, and Tracy Henley 163).
Hartley was one of the first philosophers who described the way in which learned behavior can be explained using the laws of association. For instance, he tried to combine associationism and empiricism with a basic origin of philosophy. With regards to the empiricism tradition, Hartley asserts that pain and pleasure control behavior. James Mill conclusively pushed for associationism and empiricism by asserting that each idea can be explained with regards to the principles of association and experience. Also, he said that regardless of how complex ideas are there are numerous approaches that can be applied to reduce them to simple ones. He concluded that most of the simple ideas combined to form complex ideas that are very different from the original simple ideas and that the idea of J.S. Mill of fusion was referred to mental chemistry.
According to Berkeley, the material world does not exist in the reality rather through our perceptions. Even though a God’s perception claims that an external world exists, we are only able to know our perceptions regarding that world. Hume is in agreement with the notions of Berkeley that our personal experience is the only thing that we experience. However, he disagrees with the fact that the physical world is precisely reflected in our perceptions. Human behavior is believed to be governed by emotions since people vary in their emotional patterns which result in different individual behaviors (Hergenhahn, Baldwin, and Tracy Henley 164).
Response 2.
Rationalism is the position in philosophy that postulates a mind that is active where the mind transforms sensory facts, and it has the ability to comprehend abstract concepts that cannot be solely accomplished from sensory information. Kant agrees with Hume’s idea that any conclusions regarding physical realities are usually based on personal experience. Nonetheless, Kant posed some questions regarding the source of concepts such as the effect and cause given that casual relationships are never experienced directly (Hergenhahn, Baldwin, and Tracy Henley 191). The answer was that there are innate categories of thought that participate in the modification of sensory information. The conscious experiences that we experience daily are determined by the fusion of influences of the innate categories of thought and sensory experience. With regards to the categorical imperative of Kant, the maxims that govern the behavior of an individual should be modeled in a way that they can create the basis of a moral law that is universal. According to Kant, phycology is not a science since mathematical precision could not be used to measure subjective experience rather one can beneficially study human behavior.
Herbart did not agree with the empiricists who compared a notion to a Newtonian particle in which its fate depends on the forces that are external to it. He compared a notion to a Leibnizian monad where he viewed ideas to be possessing their own energy and also saw ideas to focus on expressions that are conscious (Hergenhahn, Baldwin, and Tracy Henley 191). The collection of ideas that are well-matched of which at any given time we are conscious develops the apperceptive mass which regards all other notions as unconscious. There is a high possibility that an idea will cross the verge between the conscious and unconscious mind given that it is well-matched with the notions that makes up the apperceptive mass. Herbart is also known to be the first educational psychologist.
Work Cited
Hergenhahn, Baldwin, and Tracy Henley. An introduction to the history of psychology. Cengage Learning, 2013.
