Rationalism In The Hunger Games

Peeta’s development throughout The Hunger Games, due to the manipulation of his thoughts and memories, affecting his sense of truth and reality, could be said to embody aspects both rationalism and empiricism. The implantation of false memories that drastically counter what he had originally believed and his conviction to those beliefs before his time integrated within District 13, over which the effect of the experimentation are to some extent reversed, have the potential to be argued as either resulting from experience or from a preinstalled concept of an ultimate truth within his brain

Rationalism suggests that it is through reason and rational thinking that we can understand the forms and that we have inbuilt knowledge of the perfect version

A table is only a table because everyone calls it so, not because we have anything preprogramed in our minds which dictate what a table should look like, experimentation must take place in order to find the most efficient design and this therefore becomes the generally accepted format. However, in some instances I think perhaps there might be an ultimate form, as Plato suggests, for example, in the case of beauty, we as humans are designed to view more symmetrically faces as automatically more beautiful, depending on their proportions.

I am more inclined to agree with rationalist philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz who focused more on logic and maths, as well as self-evident truths, as these do not imply ultimate versions of particular objects as a result of creation by a greater being or concepts but instead utilise basic logical principles to reach conclusions. I think this is more the style of rationalism that one could argue was reflected in Peeta throughout the Hunger Games, instead of an ‘ultimate form ‘of his past he was instead able to deduce what was truth or

The extent to which his experience in the capital altered his demeanour and entire thought process, significantly reconstructing what he had previously known to be true and causing an extreme shift in his emotions, shows the degree of power his subjection to the environment of the capital experimentation had over him. This supports empiricism in that the experience that catalysed his metamorphosis in character and belief was primarily sensory an environmental, he was merely shown images of his life and this combined with the torturous situation within which he was place was sufficient to alter what he believed to be true, therefore his beliefs are a direct consequence of his