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Empiricism is a theory that human knowledge comes from sensory experience, ignoring instinctive ideas. John Locke argued for it in 1600, while rationalism claimed knowledge came from thinking. George Berkeley believed material things were composed of ideas and David Hume argued knowledge came from sensory experience. Phenomenalism and logical empiricism were later schools of thought.
Empiricism is a philosophical theory which holds that human knowledge is derived entirely from sensory experience. As a branch of epistemology, empiricism ignores the concept of instinctive ideas and focuses entirely on experience and evidence in relation to sensory perception. Fiercely debated, the philosophy of empiricism eventually spawned further schools that would take it to different levels of application and direction.
In 1600, as a response to the theory of rationalism fiercely defended by Rene Descartes, the philosophy of empiricism was first expounded in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argued that the only way humans acquire knowledge is through experience. Expanding on Aristotle’s notion of humans as a blank slate, Locke steadfastly argued that humans are incapable of formulating or possessing intrinsic ideas.
Continental rationalism, the rival theory of empiricism, claimed that everything has some kind of explanation. According to the rationalists, sensory experiences did not belong to the acquisition of knowledge. For the followers of this theory, knowledge was obtained only through substantive thinking and only through this intellectual perception could human beings gain understanding.
Irish philosopher George Berkeley was an idealist who believed that Locke’s philosophical theory was dangerously atheistic. He responded to Locke’s theory in the early 1700s with his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, where he argued that material things are composed exclusively of ideas, which is naturally a mental process. Berkeley set a religious tone on his version of the empirical theory, called subjective idealism, which asserted that everything humans perceive is the idiom of God.
David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, was a staunch supporter of Locke and argued that human understanding comes solely from sensory experience. Hume argued that knowledge is a given, such as through direct observation, or related to an idea or theory, as applied in logic and mathematics. According to Hume, the external, physical world is not something that can be deciphered or rationally justified.
The notions of empirical theory of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume remained pure until the early 1900s, when further schools of empirical thought were established. Phenomenalism was an intense approach to empiricist theory which asserted that all physical objects could be reduced to mental objects and that, ultimately, only mental objects exist. As expressed by John Stuart Mill in the late 1800s, phenomenalism was closely related to Berkeley’s subjective idealism in theory and application.
Logical empiricism, also known as logical positivism, became a movement that attempted to combine empirical and rational thinking. Science and metaphysical thought have influenced logical empiricism through the marriage between the importance of nature and the existence of matter. The school of logical empiricism was committed to the unification of the sciences as it held that all scientific hypotheses should be expressed in a common language for better understanding and presentation.
