Kant compared to Rationalists and Empiricists (as discussed in class)

Kant believed both rationalist and empiricist are mistaken and thus, Descartes, Hume and Locke had fallacy in their thinking. Kant believes in synthetic a priori knowledge. This may sound strange and would surely be disputed by Descartes, Hume and Locke. Kant argues that arithmetic, geometry, science (mostly physics) and metaphysics are synthetic a priori. As explained in my previous post on Kant, Kant uses the arithmetic example of 7 + 5 = 12 to demonstrate why arithmetic is synthetic a priori (see my previous post for more information on this).
The empiricists, Hume and Locke, would argue that the basis of all knowledge is a posteriori, but agree that the basis of all knowledge is synthetic. They believe knowledge is obtained by observation. And would refute the idea that synthetic knowledge (or informative knowledge) is intuitively known (a priori). Rather they would say informative knowledge must be obtained through observation (meaning a posteriori). Unlike the empiricists, the rationalist, Descartes, would agree with Kant that the basis of all knowledge is a priori, but disagree that synthetic knowledge can be a priori. As with the wax example Descartes used, one does not have to learn information as to what is happening (thus not informative) it is intuitively known the properties of wax.