As a follow-up to Lewis’s post on Early Modern Survey Courses, which has an an excellent discussion in the comments, I thought I would pose a narrower question.
How do you teach the rationalism-empiricism distinction in your survey course?
Do you structure your class around the distinction, reading the rationalists together and the empiricists together? Does Kant save the day? Do you avoid the distinction? Do you teach separate courses on rationalist and empiricist thinkers? Do you emphasize some other distinction or a network of issues?
I wonder if, even though many of us don’t find the distinction very useful in our own research, we might still find it a useful heuristic for students first encountering early modern thought.
My version of the survey course would seem, on a brief scan, to divide roughly into rationalists and empiricists, but I don’t present the class this way. In fact, about midway through I give a 10 minute talk about “rationalism vs. empiricism.” I tell them that people will expect them to be able to discuss our figures along this line after they leave this course, here are 6 or 8 different things that people sometimes mean by that distinction (each of which draws the line differently), and here are a few reasons for thinking the distinction is not particularly helpful or deep.
What are the 6-8 things you discuss as what people sometimes mean by the distinction?
How about this: “Rationalists say that human knowledge can have very wide scope, empiricists say it has narrower scope”.
Also, I don’t think it is a bad oversimplification to say: “rationalists put considerable weight on purely intellectual cognition (i.e. knowledge of the soul), while empiricists give it less weight.”
This seems to get right the traditional division between the canonical big six.
(Berkeley is subject to some interpretation for both of these.).
Of course, these points do not justify a sharp curricular division.
Lewis, here are the distinctions I mention:
innate ideas or no innate ideas
emphasis on a priori or a posteriori knowledge
content of ideas originates inside the mind or outside the mind
intelligibility or sensory experience as criterion of knowledge
causes explain their effects or causes observed conjoined with effects
PSR or no PSR
British Isles or France/Holland/Germany
traditional list of each
These distinctions are obviously not equivalent (and some are too high-level to even make good sense yet). Yet even at this point they don’t divide figures up in the same ways. (As Alan notes, Berkeley is a good example of a figure who falls on both sides, depending on the issue.) Essentially, I use this as an opportunity to talk about being wary about anachronistic categories. (One theme of my course is to notice that our ways of categorizing are not permanent forms.) Why should we read 17th & 18th philosophy the way that Kant did? What might we lose by assuming that Locke-Berkeley-Hume is the obvious genealogy? Who might be denied entrance to the canon if we maintain this distinction as fundamental?
Alan, that sort of distinction I am very happy with. I think there are a multiplicity of such distinctions worth discussing, and by not framing it as rationalist-empiricist I hope to draw out those distinctions in a way that doesn’t leave the students confusedly conflating them. I tend to prefer nearly unrestricted PSR vs. highly restricted or rejected PSR as my default on empiricist vs. rationalist considerations, and that is one of the major themes of the course (often asked through the related question of whether a particular aspect of the world, like causation, is intelligible and what “intelligible” might mean).
While I do teach the big three rationalists followed by the big three empiricists I always described the ordering as temporal (with some fudging around Leibniz / Locke. But I don’t treat them as “schools” nor as descendants of one another
Tim: I was recently in a discussion about ‘intelligible,’ a very important word! It is often used as though it were theoretically neutral, but I agree with you that its meaning is subject to interpretation. This should be obvious when comparing, e.g., Descartes and Hume.
Timothy, I try to introduce the distinction as between greater reliance upon the intellect vs. the imagination – Descartes’s chiliagon is useful for illustrating it.
[…] here about teaching modern philosophy. Lewis has posted on this topic several times, as has Tim Yenter. The discussions in the comments on each of these four posts are also really lively and […]