Empiricism

Imagine dropping a stone a thousand times, and a thousand times it falls. You are utterly certain it will fall on the thousand-and-first. But pause and ask: what, exactly, justifies that certainty? You have never seen the “necessity” of the stone’s falling — you have only seen stones falling. The leap from what has happened to what will happen seems obvious, yet when we examine it, no logical proof holds it up. This small abyss, opened by David Hume in the eighteenth century, has never quite been closed. It swallows causation, induction, the self, and much of metaphysics — and it is the best place to start understanding why Hume is perhaps the most unsettling of modern philosophers. ...

Few philosophers can claim to have changed, so deliberately and programmatically, the very purpose of human knowledge. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) did not merely propose one philosophical theory among many: he conceived a total reform of learning, a project intended to replace the Aristotelian tradition with a new method capable of generating useful, verifiable, and progressive knowledge. The title of his magnum opus — Novum Organum (1620) — announces, right on its cover, the scale of the ambition: a new instrument of thought, designed to supplant Aristotle’s ancient Organon, which had governed Western logic for nearly two millennia. ...

This is the second of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). In the first article, we followed Maréchal’s reading of the classical tradition from the pre-Socratics through Thomas Aquinas, showing how ancient and medieval thought largely assumed a direct cognitive contact with being without needing to systematically justify that assumption. In this second article, we turn to Cahier II, in which Maréchal examines the great modern debate between rationalism and empiricism — and shows how both traditions, despite opposing each other on almost every point, ultimately leave the problem of objectivity unresolved and prepare the ground for Kant’s revolutionary critique. ...

David Hume A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. While still very young he published his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), a work that, in his own words, “fell dead-born from the press” and would be recognized only much later. His reputation as a skeptic in matters of religion cost him the university chairs he sought; he made his living as a librarian, a diplomatic secretary, and above all as a highly successful essayist and historian. A man of serene and amiable temperament — “le bon David” — he died in 1776, facing death with the tranquility of a sage. ...

Francis Bacon “Father of Empiricism” and of modern experimental science. Lord Chancellor of England; fell into disgrace due to corruption. His project was to renew knowledge by replacing Aristotle’s Organon with a new inductive-experimental method. Bacon writes at the transition from the Renaissance to modernity, at a time when natural philosophy was still dominated by the Scholastic Aristotelianism transmitted through the universities. Against this tradition, he diagnoses that inherited knowledge had become sterile: highly skilled at disputing and classifying, yet incapable of producing useful works or of extending human dominion over nature. The central problem, for Bacon, was not a lack of intelligence but the lack of a correct method. Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, on his reading, merely rearranges the confused notions already contained in words, without guaranteeing that those notions correspond to things; it therefore serves to win debates, not to discover new truths about the world. In response, Bacon proposes a “Great Instauration” (Instauratio Magna) of knowledge — a fresh start grounded in ordered experience and methodical observation rather than in the authority of the ancients. ...

George Berkeley An Irish philosopher born in 1685 and later the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley produced his most important philosophical works while still very young, before the age of thirty. A man of faith and action, he even crossed the Atlantic with a project to found a college in Bermuda for the American colonies. He is remembered as the second great name of British empiricism, between Locke and Hume — and the most surprising of the three, for pushing empiricism to a radical conclusion: that matter does not exist. ...

John Locke John Locke was born in Wrington, England, in 1632, was educated at Oxford, and practiced medicine before becoming secretary and physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, which brought him into the orbit of high English politics. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the absolutist Stuart crown, he went into exile in Holland during the reign of James II and returned only in 1689, with the Glorious Revolution, which enshrined the parliamentary order he would help to justify philosophically. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism and one of the greatest influences on empiricism and modern political thought. ...