Colloquial usage of the term dogmatism refers to an absolutist mentality that doesn’t allow for the revision or inclusion of new knowledge. Dogmatism in a philosophical context is somewhat similar, as it refers to the often unjustified acceptance of knowledge without adequate support or examination. Although true rationalism doesn’t involve dogmatism as there is nothing rational about being dogmatic, rationalism tends to lead to dogmatism as it is very difficult to be a pure rationalist. Rationalists …show more content…
The certain nature of rationalism lends itself to a kind of arrogance that can go dreadfully wrong when paired with the unwillingness to acknowledge individual experience as often happens as rationalists prioritize reason over sense experience. Considering rationalism’s emphasis on a priori knowledge, knowledge acquired independent of sense experience, rationalists could just sit and think the world into existence and still claim that they used reason to form knowledge about the external world and things that are clearly outside of experience’s realm, such as the existence of God. Rationalists, like Descartes, often think that they are being perfectly rational in their philosophies, when actually they are dogmatic in their attempts to use logic to justify their preferred …show more content…
He does a fine job up to a point – his ideas are consistent and follow from each other, but then he includes the antinomies to leave room for faith and everything becomes murky. In his discussion of the noumena vs phenomena or the real world as opposed to the world of appearances, Kant seems to negate his earlier progress in combatting the skeptical and emerges as a pseudo-rationalist. He previously maintained that nothing could be known about the noumena as it was a limiting principle, without content. I understand that the concept of noumena is necessary for the purpose of introducing and providing a basis for the antimonies, but it seems unjustified to claim that there exists no concept of space and time within the noumena. If the noumenon is supposedly beyond human understanding, it doesn’t seem consistent to decide to undermine the unknowable nature by negation. The motivation of the inclusion the noumenal world is revealed in Kant’s antimonies, which are sets of arguments that are perfectly balanced arguments equivalent in logical strength with no