That which is preliminary and not resting on experience.
It is in opposition to A posteriori, which is knowledge based on experience.
The question of whether there are innate ideas, such as we were born with, and which were not separated in the process of experimentation, has been debated from antiquity to the present day.
For empiricists, the human mind is a tabula rasa (clean slate);
For rationalists, we test ideas in experience and also separate them from it.
The debate between empiricists and rationalists is at the heart of Western philosophy in the modern age. Nowadays, linguist Noam Chomsky passionately advocates that our need for language is clear proof of our a priori or innate networks of ideas.
