A Priori & Innate Ideas (Will's Vacillations)

We also worked through some stuff from Gareth Southwell's http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/ 'Theory of knowledge', unit 2, 'Rationalism', and tried to work out what 'a priori' ideas were. As ever things were less straightforward than they seemed and we veered from thinking some things were to nothing was to back again. (Will was best at this back and forth business, but that's a sign of a thinking man!).

Eventually we worked out that we need to distinguish two ways of understanding of 'apriori':

1. ideas that are innate but may have to be 'found' through the use of our 'Reason' or brought out through 'experience' or 'teaching' (like Plato's Socrates and the slave boy).

2. ideas that are true 'before' (in the sense of independent of or outside of experience) like maths, geometry etc.