The Mind Is Born Tabulasa Rasa free essay sample

However some philsophers believe we are infact born with some innate knowledge. Tabula rasa is the theory that at birth the mind is blank and holds no knowledge, but when you are born you are considered to be the scribe due to experience and ideas. First mention of the idea of tabula rasa in Western society is implied rather than specifically written. Aristotle writes of the mind as a slate upon which nothing has been written, which greatly differs from Plato’s concept of the soul existing prior to arriving on the earth. Thomas Aquinas picks up Aristotle’s tabula rasa theories in the 13th century, but it is not until the 17th century that the words tabula rasa are used by John Locke to express the idea that the mind when it enters the world is nothing and contains nothing. It is merely the blank slate upon which experience begins to â€Å"write† the person. We will write a custom essay sample on The Mind Is Born Tabulasa Rasa or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page As the person matures, he is able to begin to â€Å"write† himself, expressing the freedom of the individual to construct the soul. This freedom may be impaired by the way in which early experiences have shaped the person. John Locke, an English philosopher, set out the principles of empiricism. He advanced the hypothesis that people learn primarily from external forces. Locke examined how people acquire ideas in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, and empty of ideas. We acquire knowledge, he argued, from the information about the objects in the world that our senses bring to us. We begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex ones. However people believed to argue against it. eople believed newborn babies were born with a brain that had nothing built-in so the newborn babies brain was thought of as a tabula rasa or blank slate. This theory purported that newborn babies start out knowing nothing and have to learn absolutely everything. We know today that this is an erroneous premise and that newborn babies brains are actually hard wired to do many, many things useful for survival. In fact, newborn babies come out of the womb learning ready. They are feeling and sensing new sights, sounds, and personal experiences that are foreign to them. All of these stimuli are being taken into the brain and it is reacting to them. Plato believes that the knowledge is innate and the simple act of recollection is all that is need to gain the knowledge. This would be shown in his theory of the Realm of the Forms and his cave analogy. The thesis behind his analoy is the basic idea that all we perceive are imperfect reflections of the ultimate Forms, which subsequently represent truth and reality. In his story, Plato establishes a cave in which prisoners are chained down and forced to look upon the front wall of the cave. When summarizing the Analogy of the Cave The prisoners are bound to the floor and unable to turn their heads to see what goes on behind them. To the back of the prisoners, under the protection of the parapet, lie the puppeteers whom are casting the shadows on the wall in which the prisoners are perceiving reality. Thus when the prisoners get to a mature age they can unlock to real truth of knowledge and walk out of the cave into the Realm of the Forms thus saying we are born with innate knowledge.