Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College

 

A Philosophical Map

 

These two main schools of epistemological thought...

The Rationalist Philosophers René Descartes 1596-1650 Benedictus de Spinosa  1632-1677 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1646-1716

and

The Empiricist Philosophers John Locke 1561-1620 George Berkeley  1685-1753 David Hume 1711-1776

... and the tensions between these two schools of thought
converge in the work of

(1724-1804)

especially in his book

The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

In that book, the central question is...

Is it even possible to know what's Really Real?

When later Philosophers ask that question they end up giving different answers to it.

The main possible answers to that Big Question
include these:

No, it's not possible to know what's really real	Yes, it is possible, and what's really real is	Yes, it is possible, and what's really real is	Yes, it is possible, and what's really real is
Nihilism	Matter	Spirit	Will
	Karl Marx	G W F Hegel	Arthur Schopenhauer

Descendants of Schopenhauer's thought include...  Existentialism Friedrich Nietzsche Soren Kierkegaard Jean-Paul Sartre Albert Camus etc  Depth Psychology Sigmund Freud Alfred Adler Carl Jung Viktor Frankl Abraham Maslow etc

 

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