Innate Ideas
According to Webster’s dictionary, innate means existing in or belonging to an individual from birth, or, belonging to the essential nature of something. For centuries, philosophers have debated the issue of whether ideas and knowledge are innate, or whether they develop from external influences. The main question here is where do our ideas come from? ... Each discussion will begin by addressing what each philosopher believed the meaning of having an innate idea is. You will see that each argument turns on each philosopher’s view of whether innate ideas do in fact exist. ... He believed that all knowledge is innate. ... In other words, according to Plato only part of what we think we know, is innate. When trying to define innateness, Descartes used it in the same sense of the word as when we say some diseases are innate. So what does it mean to have an innate disease? ... Here, Descartes draws a parallel to innate knowledge. According to this philosophy, a person may have innate knowledge but not be aware of it yet. ... This is the same as innate ideas or knowledge because if an idea or knowledge occurs later in life it is hard to determine if they had that idea all along or if that idea was just learned. It is clear that the explanation of innate belief on the analogy of innate disease is not as direct as Descartes may have thought. I can follow and somewhat understand Descartes’ correlation between innate ideas and innate diseases, yet I do not think that the relationship clearly defines innateness. ... This theory believes that “all of our ideas are collected from ideas of properties of bodies which we have experienced in sensation, or ideas of mental operations which we have experienced in ourselves” (72). While Descartes believes that ideas are innate whether they are known to the person or not, Aristotle believes that there are no such innate ideas. Aristotle views the human mind starting out just like a blank sheet of paper having no natural ideas. ... Instead all ideas of the mind come from the outside through perception.