Empericism v.s. Rationalism
Jessica Martindale Philosophy 111-752 09-30-02 Report #2 Here we have two different theories on how we (humans) obtain our knowledge of reality. On one hand we have Leibniz's theory of rationalism and on the other hand we have Locke's theory of empiricism. Leibniz states that knowledge of reality is obtained from reasoning alone as opposed to experience. He believes that everything is connected in a complete network of explanation. He also believes that there is only one substance (God) and that everything else is derived from that substance, which in turn causes every substance to be a mirror of God. That also causes everything to be different; there are no two identical substances. Since Leibniz thinks that God is the infinite being and the source of the intelligibility of all things, he believes that God chose the most perfect universe. Thus the existing world is the best of all possibilities. According to Leibniz, truth is just simply a proposition in which the predicate is contained in the subject, which you can see in one of his examples: "Caesar crossed the Rubicon River." He is also saying that for every predicate that is true of a subject, there will be a set of other true predicates, which constitute a sufficient reason for its being true.