“Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity and scope. It is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion”. The word comes from the Greek words “episteme” or knowledge, understanding or acquaintance and “logos” or account, argument or reason. Epistemology is the study of the origins of our knowledge and asks questions such as “Do we know things?”, “How do we know things?” and “When do we know things?”. This theory attempts to explain whether knowledge is naturally occurring or if it is a process based on the everyday experiences that people have. Both rationalists and empiricists had their own unique and different approaches to epistemology. Rationalists believed that knowledge is best gained through our rational capabilities or our intellectual reasoning while empiricists on the other hand believed that knowledge is gained from our experiences of the senses. Some famous rationalists were Plato and Descartes who believed that genuine knowledge is discovered by using our “reasoning abilities, independent of sense experience.” (Chaffee). These different approaches to epistemology were a big reason behind Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato. Aristotle on the other hand, was an empiricist who believed that we gain knowledge through using reason. After many years and many philosophers including John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley and David Hume (also known as the “British empiricists”), trying to figure things out, they all collectively agreed that there was no way to prove that this external reality existed apart from our personal experience of it. At the end of the day, this responsibility was left to German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant made such an impact in the history of philosophy that philosophies today are either pre-Kantian or post-Kantian (Chaffee). It seemed as if Kant had come right in time as the biggest controversy was happening in the history of philosophy. He had began to address the previous philosophies and was ready to establish a new theory of knowledge that would serve as a basis for modern science. This theory though, had to also include “a priori knowledge” (Chaffee) which Kant considered metaphysical as it is based on reason, independent of sense experience and also math, logic, knowledge of the self and more. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant investigates how the human mind constructs a knowable word. He starts off using scientific knowledge about how the mind actively works to construct reality as an active passive process, which is known as perception. According to Kant, the mind selects, organizes, and interprets experience to construct a unified view of the world. In this, he acknowledges both rationalistic and empiricist ideals by acknowledging that yes, knowledge comes from experience but not ALL knowledge. He supports this by talking about the minds role in perspective and the science behind it all and both the aposteriori experience and the a prior knowledge in humans.
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