We explain what empiricism is, its characteristics and its main representatives. Also, differences with rationalism.
What is empiricism?
Empiricism is a philosophical school that thinks of experience as a starting point and ultimate foundation of all possible knowledge.
For empiricists, reality is the basis of all knowledge . The human mind must start from the sensible world, that is, what is perceived by the senses, to form ideas and concepts.
Philosophically opposed to rationalism, empiricism was particularly developed by different English philosophers which is why we often speak of “English empiricism.” Some of its main defenders were Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, who opposed the ideas held by thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz.
Etymology and origin of empiricism
The term empiricism comes from the Greek “empairía” (έμπειρία), whose Latinization is experience . In ancient Greece, empirical knowledge was opposed to the idea of knowing through intellectual learning, especially in philosophy and the theoretical sciences.
Empirical thinking has roots in classical antiquity especially in the work of Aristotle and some Greco-Roman philosophers such as Hippocrates of Cos (5th century BC), Archimedes (3rd century BC) or Galen (2nd century AD). They understood empirical knowledge as the useful and technical knowledge of doctors, architects and artisans in general, as opposed to theoretical knowledge of the speculative and reflective areas of science in general.
However, empiricism emerged as a philosophical movement in the Modern Age final point of a thought process that began in the late Middle Ages.
Empirical knowledge
empiricism emerged as a philosophical school between the 16th and 18th centuries . Rationalist philosophers, such as Descartes, Leibniz or Spinoza, maintained that we know the world through reason, and prioritized the intellectual intuitions of reason as a source of knowledge. Empiricist philosophers, on the other hand, believed that we can only know the world through sensitivity and prioritized the sensations obtained through sensory perception as a source of knowledge.
Experience as a starting point meant that knowledge could only be possessed a posterioriNo a prioriand that is why they linked the idea of experience to experimentation, just as Bacon did in the Novum organum. For empiricists, the only thing possible was the sensation as a testimony of an external experience except for Locke, who believed that reflection was testimony to an internal experience.
Locke was the first to say that the human mind was similar to a blank slate or “tabula rasa” on which external impressions were recorded after having been experienced. Hume, on the other hand, was the one who revolutionized the idea of causality by saying that it was a fiction imposed by the mind. He did the same with the ideas of subject or substance, considered until then as innate ideas (according to idealism, they were the ideas with which human beings were born).
George Berkeley, Irish bishop born in 1685, gave way to extreme empiricism . For him, objects could only exist if they were perceived. This became known as the beginning esse est percipi“to be is to be perceived”, which determines that objects are always perceived. Even when a human did not perceive something, that object would be perceived by God as a supreme entity.
Even though empiricism did not end with the works of Locke, Berkeley or Hume, His ideas were collected by Immanuel Kant who once wrote that Hume was responsible for waking him from his dogmatic slumber. His best-known work, the Critique of pure reasonis famous, among other things, for having essayed a third position that sought to resolve disputes between empiricists and idealists: transcendental idealism.
Characteristics of empiricism
Some ideas of empiricism are:
- Sensitive reality can be perceived, it is the origin of all ideas . First we perceive the world and then we think or imagine it. We cannot imagine something without first having perceived a material that fuels the act of imagining. Human beings learn through their senses.
- Knowledge is subjective . There are no preconceived ideas, but you are born with a “blank” mind. Knowledge is acquired from internal experiences (thoughts, emotions, etc.) and external experiences (material and physical).
- Empirical knowledge poses an opposition to rationalism . At the same time, it continues and evaluates the nominalist criticism that began in the Late Middle Ages (regarding the so-called “problem of universals”).
Representatives of empiricism
The main representatives of empiricism were:
- John Locke (1632-1704). He was an English philosopher and doctor, also the father of Classical Liberalism. His work was greatly influenced by the writings of Sir Francis Bacon. His famous Essay on human understanding of 1689 was a reply to René Descartes, and proposed that the human mind was a Blank slateupon which knowledge is imprinted a posteriori through experience.
- David Hume (1711-1776). He was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian, and one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and Western thought. He defended the thesis that knowledge derives from sensible experience. His essays are famous Treatise of human nature (1739) and Research on human understanding (1748), in which he reduces all knowledge to “impressions” or “ideas”, from which two possible types of knowledge arise: factual truths and relations of ideas.
- George Berkeley (1685-1753). He was a bishop of Berkeley and Irish philosopher, who proposed a subjective or immaterialist idealism, whose main postulate was that matter itself does not exist but rather its perception. The world exists only as long as we perceive it. To explain why the world does not disappear while we sleep or when we blink, he proposed that God is the great observer of the universe, whose constant, universal eye ensures that everything continues to exist.
Empiricism and rationalism
Empiricism and rationalism were two radically opposite sides both heirs of skepticism as a philosophical thought.
English skepticism held the non-existence of the possibility of knowledge a priori and defended the idea of knowledge originating through what is perceptible by the senses.
For its part, Rationalism defended reason and intellect as the only means of knowledge . René Descartes, one of the main exponents of rationalism, tried to show how, starting from the cogito (his famous cogito ergo sum“I think, therefore I am”) we can find the ideas we have about the world. Rationalism rejected the knowledge obtained from the senses, claiming that they can deceive us or provide false information about reality.
The disputes between both philosophical systems not only occurred regarding the origin of knowledge, but also around innatism, the idea of causality, substance or identity. From this dispute arose, some time later, the work of one of the most important philosophers of modernity, Immanuel Kant. In the Critique of pure reasonKant discussed, reconciled and overcame the positions held by both.
Continue in: Rationalism
Importance of empiricism
Empiricism was a fundamental school in the emergence of new currents of thought that tried to get rid of idealism as a way of interpreting reality. For example, allowed the emergence of scientific thought and the scientific method within which deduction, born as a result of English empiricism, played a very important role.
empiricism opened the doors to intellectual atheism and on the other hand, Kantian thought emerged from its opposition with rationalism. This thought attempted to reconcile their positions and later played a decisive role in Western culture.
References
- Stroud, B. (1977). Hume. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Yébenes, JAV (2000). Empiricism and its method. Philosophy Magazine (Madrid), 23(1).
- Gupta, A. (2006). Empiricism and experience. Oxford University Press.
- “Rationalism vs. Empiricism” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy.
- “Empiricism (Philosophy)” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
