Although there are a few extremist philosophers, generally most agree that both these approaches to knowledge are needed, and that to some extent they support and correct each other. More on that in a moment.
Rationalists focus on what they call necessary truth .
By that they mean that certain things are necessarily true, always, universally. The most basic form of necessary truth is the self-evident truth . It has to be true. The truths of mathematics, for example, are often thought of as self-evident. One plus one equals two.