British Empiricism

Classification

Period

c. 1620-1750 CE

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind

Overview

British Empiricism holds that all knowledge ultimately derives from experience. Locke argued the mind begins as a blank slate (tabula rasa), Berkeley pushed this to idealism (to be is to be perceived), and Hume drew radical skeptical conclusions, undermining the rational grounds of causal and inductive inference and the idea of an enduring self.

Key figures

John Locke · George Berkeley · David Hume · Francis Bacon

Methods used

• Empirical Inquiry · Open in Methods
• Inductive Reasoning · Open in Methods
• Introspection · Open in Methods

Positions held

• Bundle Theory

  This is Hume's view, not Locke's: looking inward, Hume reported that he could never catch himself without a perception, and could observe nothing but the perceptions themselves.

  Question scope: Persistence of the Self

• Empiricism

  Question scope: Experience or Reason?

• Humean Regularity

  This is Hume's view: the idea of necessary connection comes not from anything observed in the objects but from the mind's habit of expecting the usual effect once it has seen two kinds of event constantly joined.

  Question scope: The Nature of Causation

• Psychological Continuity

  This is Locke's view, not Hume's: a person reaches as far back as consciousness can extend to past thoughts and actions, whether or not the same substance underlies them.

  Question scope: Persistence of the Self

Influenced by

• Medieval Nominalism

  Inherited the nominalist rejection of real universals and its restriction of knowledge to particular things, which empiricism recast as knowledge grounded in particular sense experience.

• Pyrrhonism

  The early-modern revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism (via Sextus) sharpened empiricism's doubts about how far the senses warrant knowledge; Hume presented his own mitigated skepticism as, in part, the result of Pyrrhonian doubt corrected by common sense and reflection.

Later connections

• Analytic Philosophy Influenced by this tradition

  Kept Locke's and Hume's demand that meaningful discourse answer to experience, but made the whole statement, rather than the single idea or term, the unit that must answer to it; Quine later widened that unit to the whole of science.

• French Enlightenment Influenced by this tradition

  Voltaire's admiration for Locke and Newton carried British empiricism's trust in observation and its critique of inherited authority into the philosophes' program.

• Kantian Critical Philosophy Influenced by this tradition

  Kant took up Hume's problem about cause and effect: reason cannot show a priori why, if one thing is given, another must necessarily follow, so Hume traced the felt necessity to a habit formed by repeated experience. Kant widened the problem from causation to every concept by which the understanding connects things a priori.

• Logical Positivism Influenced by this tradition
• Phenomenology Influenced by this tradition

  Husserl read Hume's analysis of experience as an unwitting anticipation of phenomenology, and inherited the notion of intentionality from Brentano's descriptive psychology, itself rooted in the empiricist attention to experience, before transforming it into an a priori science of consciousness.

• Positivism Influenced by this tradition
• Pragmatism Influenced by this tradition
• Classical Utilitarianism Influenced by this tradition

References

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, British Empiricism
• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), the work that gives the start date used here
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), §IV Part II (inferences from experience are not founded on reasoning) and §VII (the idea of necessary connection arises from custom)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Francis Bacon, §1 — Formation: Bacon's English natural-philosophical project, culminating in Novum Organum (1620).
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, British Empiricism, §3 (Hume's empiricist treatment of causation, applying the Lockean axiom to the metaphysics of necessary connection)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, British Empiricism, §2.2 (Locke on sensation and reflection) and §3.a (Berkeley's idealism: only minds and ideas exist)
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.4.6
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism
• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.3.14
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §VII
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Locke on Personal Identity
• Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. III: Ockham to Suárez, ch. 9 (Ockhamist nominalism as an antecedent of British empiricism)
• Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford University Press, 2003), for the early-modern revival of Sextus up to Bayle
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), §XII, Part III (a 'mitigated scepticism, or academical philosophy' that 'may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism' once corrected by common sense and reflection)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, §1.2 'The Empiricism Thesis'
• Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Book I, aphorisms 19 and 105 (true induction ascends gradually from particulars, against induction by simple enumeration)
• John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.i.4 (ideas of reflection)
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke
• A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume
• Novum Organum — Francis Bacon