Early modern Europe · 1620 – 1776
British empiricism
All our ideas and knowledge come from experience, so claims that reach beyond any possible experience deserve doubt.
Where do our ideas come from, and how far can they reach?
Francis Bacon called for a new science built on observation and experiment rather than Aristotelian syllogism, and the Royal Society put that programme into practice. Locke, a physician and friend of the chemist Robert Boyle, wanted to map the limits of human understanding before people argued over questions it could not settle.
Trace any idea in the mind and it leads back to sensation or to reflection on our own mental operations; there is no evidence of ideas present at birth. If so, knowledge can reach only as far as experience goes. Hume pushed this to the end: since we never perceive a necessary connection between cause and effect, our belief in causation rests on habit, not reason.
- The mind begins as a blank slate, furnished by experience.
- An idea has meaning only if it traces back to experience.
- Causal necessity is never perceived; it is a habit of expectation.
It shaped scientific method and modern psychology, inspired the Enlightenment, and through Hume’s skepticism woke Kant and later fed logical positivism.
Thinkers
1561–1626Francis BaconEnglish statesman who called for science built on experiment1632–1704John LockeEnglish physician and philosopher of experience, consent and toleration1685–1753George BerkeleyIrish bishop who argued that to be is to be perceived1711–1776David HumeScottish skeptic who traced knowledge and morals to experience and feelingKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstAristotelianismBacon’s Novum Organum (“new instrument”) was named against Aristotle’s logical Organon, replacing syllogism with methodical induction from experiment.Reacted against
RationalismBook I of Locke’s Essay attacks the doctrine of innate ideas, arguing that everything in the mind can be traced to experience.Grew out of
Late-medieval nominalismOckham’s view that only particulars exist, and that entities should not be multiplied, lived on in the empiricists’ suspicion of abstract ideas and unseen substances.
What it led to
Carried on byThe EnlightenmentVoltaire’s Letters on the English (1733) presented Locke and Newton to France as models of a modest, experimental reason.Opposed by
Kant’s critical philosophyHume’s attack on causal necessity woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber”; Kant answered that causality is a category the mind brings to experience, not something learned from it.Carried on by
UtilitarianismHume showed how much of morality rests on utility, and Bentham wrote that reading Hume made him feel “as if scales had fallen from my eyes”.Carried on by
PragmatismPragmatism kept the empiricist rule that ideas answer to experience, but looked forward to consequences and action rather than back to sense impressions.Carried on by
Early analytic philosophyRussell’s theory of knowledge by acquaintance with sense-data carried British empiricism into the new logical framework.Carried on by
Logical positivism (Vienna Circle)Hume’s division of all knowledge into “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact” became the positivists’ analytic–empirical divide.