Kuno Fischer
(1824-1907)
Kuno Fischer was an early follower of
Hegel, but his 1860 book
Kants Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre (Kant's life and the foundations of his doctrine) as an early contribution to the so-called "return to
Kant".
Fischer's greatest contribution to European philosophy was categorizing philosophers as rationalists or empiricists, particularly thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
For Fischer, empiricists included
John Locke,
George Berkeley and
David Hume. Rationalists were
René Descartes,
Baruch Spinoza and
G. W. Leibniz.
Empiricism, it is said, claims that human knowledge is derived from sensation, i.e.
experience, while rationalism claims that certain knowledge can be acquired before any experience through pure principles.
The origins of both rationalism and empiricism are found in the works of scholastic philosophers
Thomas Aquinas and
John Duns Scotus
Aquinas thought that God had created all things in accordance with Reason, and thus had no
freedom in his creations, concluding logically that there is only one
possible world. God had also given man the power of reason, enabling man to understand the world.
By contrast, Scotus insisted that God's freedom meant that to learn what exists, one has to study the
actual world, gathering
evidence about reality.
Fischer's rationalist/empiricist division corresponds in science to the distinction between theory and practice.
A famous quip is that, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is often a big difference between theory and practice.
Thomas Huxley,
Charles Darwin's famous "bulldog," had a similar remark...
"The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by a brutal fact."
Of course the great power of theory is that it occasionally predicts unknown things (for example
quantum mechanics) that are subsequently confirmed by experimental evidence, adding to the stock of human knowledge (
our Sum).
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