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Tabula Rasa

The document discusses the philosophy of tabula rasa, which is Latin for "blank slate". It describes how the concept originated in Aristotle's work from the 4th century BCE, where he compared the mind to a blank writing tablet. Later philosophers like the Stoics also argued that the mind was originally blank before receiving ideas from the senses. The document then focuses on John Locke's influential argument in 1690 that the mind at birth resembles a blank white paper with all materials of reason and knowledge coming from experience. However, Locke did not believe the mind was literally blank, acknowledging some innate reflection and limited a priori knowledge. The concept of the mind starting with a blank slate remained influential in British and American philosophy into the mid-

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Angela May Salazar
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56 views

Tabula Rasa

The document discusses the philosophy of tabula rasa, which is Latin for "blank slate". It describes how the concept originated in Aristotle's work from the 4th century BCE, where he compared the mind to a blank writing tablet. Later philosophers like the Stoics also argued that the mind was originally blank before receiving ideas from the senses. The document then focuses on John Locke's influential argument in 1690 that the mind at birth resembles a blank white paper with all materials of reason and knowledge coming from experience. However, Locke did not believe the mind was literally blank, acknowledging some innate reflection and limited a priori knowledge. The concept of the mind starting with a blank slate remained influential in British and American philosophy into the mid-

Uploaded by

Angela May Salazar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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tabula rasa

philosophy
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By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History

John Locke
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tabula rasa, (Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”) in epistemology (theory of


knowledge) and psychology, a supposed condition that empiricists have attributed to the
human mind before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the
external world of objects.

Comparison of the mind to a blank writing tablet occurs in Aristotle’s De anima (4th


century BCE; On the Soul), and the Stoics as well as the Peripatetics (students at
the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle) subsequently argued for an original state
of mental blankness. Both the Aristotelians and the Stoics, however, emphasized those
faculties of the mind or soul that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving
ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by an intellectual process and convert them
into knowledge.
A new and revolutionary emphasis on the tabula rasa occurred late in the 17th century,
when the English empiricist John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1689), argued for the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void
of all characters,” with “all the materials of reason and knowledge” derived from
experience. Locke did not believe, however, that the mind is literally blank or empty
prior to experience, and almost no other empiricist has taken such an extreme position.
Locke himself acknowledged an innate power of “reflection” (awareness of one’s own
ideas, sensations, emotions, and so on) as a means of exploiting the materials given by
experience as well as a limited realm of a priori (nonexperiential) knowledge, which he
nevertheless regarded as “trifling” and essentially empty of content (e.g., “soul is soul”
and “every man is an animal”). The 18th-century Scottish empiricist David Hume held
similar views. Suitably qualified notions of the tabula rasa remained influential in
British and subsequently Anglo-American (analytic) philosophy through the mid-20th
century.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Brian
Duignan.
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foundationalism, in epistemology, the view that some beliefs can justifiably be held
by inference from other beliefs, which themselves are justified directly—e.g., on the
basis of rational intuition or sense perception. Beliefs about material objects or about
the theoretical entities of science, for example, are not regarded as basic or foundational
in this way but are held to require inferential support. Foundationalists have typically
recognized self-evident truths and reports of sense-data as basic, in the sense that they
do not need support from other beliefs. Such beliefs thus provide the foundations on
which the edifice of knowledge can properly be built. See also coherentism.

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