Description:

Empiricists think that all concepts we possess come from perceptual experience. In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke put forward and justifies a version of this view. On the contrary, nativists think that not all out concepts come from perceptual experience and posit innate concepts. In his New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Leibniz undertakes the task of criticizing point by point the empiricist view of concepts. Leibniz's dialectic is complex because it purports not only to refute Locke's empiricism but also put forward a better, alternative nativist view. This discussion between Locke and Leibniz is central to understand each author's overall philosophical views as well as a way to the argumentative strategy each one has to defend their views. This discussion also represented a fertile ground for new, more nuanced and sophisticated views for each author and can be seen as one of the highlights in modern philosophy. The study of this debate will allow a grasp of modern philosophy's main ways to approach problems in a systematic way, since for both authors what is at stake is more than a discussion about the reasons for defending a certain view on concepts and perception: at stake are as well moral, epistemological, religious and metaphysical consequences of defending empiricism and nativism. This course will review this debate by reading the primary sources of it and will look at the end at contemporary advocates of both empiricism and nativism.