Tabula Rasa

The term tabula rasa means "blank slate" in Latin. Research papers on the concept of tabula rasa will cover the phrase from a philosophical standpoint. You may want to write about the phrase in modern terms, as it refers to the state of the human mind, that individuals are born as blank slates and that all knowledge comes through experience and perceptions. In the nature versus nurture debate, tabula rasa comes down heavily in terms of nurture. You can also focus your research paper on the historical view of "tabula rasa". Paper Masters can help you write a custom research paper on any philosophy topic.

Historical Uses of Tabula Rasa

Many famous philosophers have used the concept of tabula rasa, such as:

• Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, in On the Soul, wrote that men were like unscribed tablets.
• It was the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) who first developed the term in the 11th century AD.
• Thomas Aquinas also used the concept, countering the Platonic tradition that all human knowledge preexisted.
• In the 17th century, John Locke used the term "blank slate" as the foundation for his understanding of empiricism.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to make use of the Latin phrase tabula rasa.

Tabula Rasa Today

In the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, who maintained that personality traits were formed within the family context, adopted the idea for psychoanalysis. Some modern psychologists have demonstrated that the physical structure of the brain is conducive to spontaneous learning, such as language ability, and the cerebral cortex is organized to process sensory information, and that these pre programmed structures facilitate learning. Further, there is a genetic influence on some aspects of personality traits, reigniting the tabula rasa debate.