PSYC 3140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Panpsychism, Animism, Baruch Spinoza
9 May 2018
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PSYC 3140
Lecture 36
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• Rationalists
o The rationalist emphasized the importance of innate structures,
principles, or concepts and postulated an active mind that
transforms, in important ways, the data provided by the senses.
o Many rationalist do not oppose the notion of innate ideas.
o Typically, the rationalist assumed innate mental structures,
principles, operations, or abilities that are used in analyzing the
content of thought.
• the rationalist tended to believe that there are truths about ourselves
and about the world that cannot be ascertained simply by
experiencing the content of our minds;
o Such truths must be arrived at by such processes as logical
deduction, analysis, argument, and intuition.
o The criterion of the truth is intellectual and deductive – not
sensory.
o rationalist tended to believe in the existence of truths that could
not be discovered through sensory data alone. Instead, the
information provided by the senses must be digested by a
rational system before such truths could be discovered.
• For the rationalist, it was important not only to understand the
contents of the mind, part of which may indeed come from
experience, but also to know how the mechanisms, abilities, or
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