Modern rationalism and its limits

Rationalism and Empiricism in Modern Medicine

About ten years ago, after fellowships and clinical experience in a community setting, I had my first experience as a ward attending in a university hospital. We were working with cardiac patients, and I was struck by the common treatment each patient received. No matter what the symptoms, patients received an exercise treadmill, an echocardiogram, and were put on a calcium channel blocker. Thi...

Galen’s Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism, and its Relevance for Modern Linguistics

Methodology in Linguistics, since the late 1950s, has largely followed the model put forward in Chomsky’s early adaptations of the Structuralist approach (Chomsky, 1957, 1965, 1966, 1975; Chomsky and Halle, 1968), though misapplication of the model has resulted in a methodological dichotomy not unlike that between the early Rationalist and Empiricist approaches to anatomy that emerged from Hipp...

Descartes the doctor: rationalism and its therapies.

During the Scientific Revolution one important gauge of the quality of reformed natural philosophical knowledge was its ability to produce a more effective medical practice. Indeed, it was sometimes thought that philosophers who pretended to possess new and more potent philosophical knowledge might display that possession in personal health and longevity. Rene Descartes repeatedly wrote that a ...

Franz von Baader’s Criticism of Modern Rationalism A Brief Overview

Biological Rationalism

I argue that contemporary philosophy of language in the analytic tradition rests on two fundamentally wrong assumptions: empiricism and externalism. After I show why these two assumptions are incorrect, I turn my attention to biological rationalism. Biological rationalism—a research program inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky—is committed to nativism and internalism. I believe biological ratio...