Tabula rasa (Latin: blank slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.
Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour and intelligence.
In Western philosophy, traces of the idea that came t...
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Tabula rasa (Latin: blank slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception.
Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour and intelligence.
In Western philosophy, traces of the idea that came to be called the tabula rasa appear as early as the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle writes of the unscribed tablet in what is probably the first textbook of psychology in the Western canon, his treatise Περι Ψυχης (De Anima or On the Soul). However, besides some arguments by the Stoics and Peripatetics, the notion of the mind as a blank slate went much unnoticed for more than 1,000 years.
Then in the 11th century, the theory of tabula rasa was developed more clearly by the early Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina (known as "Avicenna" in the Western...
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