Handbook

Plato portrays a fundamental divide between appearance and reality in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’ in Book VII of The Republic. According to his rationalist vision, it is possible to make contact with the Forms, to get at a deeper reality that goes beyond how things appear to us. This encourages the idea that philosophers can discover the true essence of things by relying on their faculty of pure reason – a faculty independent of the senses. These Platonic claims were revived in the early modern era, in a quite different intellectual context, by thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz and challenged by empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Students will critically examine the early modern debates been rationalists and their empiricist challengers about the nature of ideas and whether and how they are acquired.