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St. Thomas Aquinas: The Power Of Rationalism And Sense Perception

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Furthermore, St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican monk and doctor of the Church adopted the Aristotelian Philosophy and he believed that our mind is like a blank slate “tabula rasa.”
Therefore, I firmly believed that things that exist in the consciousness are first experienced by the senses. Our senses are the pragmatic organs that encode information coming from the stimuli to the human brain. It is again through sensing: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and healing. There is no any idea which does not come from our senses.
All thoughts and ideas come into our consciousness through what we have heard, seen, felt, smelled, and tasted are the sources of knowledge. In Aristotelian point of view, we have no innate ideas, rather what we have is an innate power of reason. We have the innate faculty of organizing all sensory impressions into categories and classes. This is how concept “man”, “animal”, and “plant” arise. Our reason is completely empty until we have sensed something.
Moreover, in the Modern Period, Immanuel Kant reconciles the conflict between the rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism tries to explain that all knowledge comes from the mind and that all sense perceptions are undeniable while empiricism on the other hand, tried to believe that the role of the mind is to give strong emphasis on the reliability of the sense perception. Again, going back to Kant, he have said, “Experience without understanding is thoughtless, while understanding without experience is
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