<epistemology, neo-empiricism, cartesianism, innatism> <rationalism, ockhamism, skepticism, metaphysics, test> <experience, Plato's dialectic method> the view that all ideas, and all knowledge of the world derives solely from sensory experience or perception; denying the existence of innate ideas in opposition to rationalism.
reliance on experience as the source of ideas and knowledge. More specifically, empiricism is the epistemological theory that genuine information about the world must be acquired by a posteriori means, so that nothing can be thought without first being sensed. Prominent modern empiricists include Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. In the twentieth century, empiricism principles were extended and applied by the pragmatists and the logical positivists. Recommended Reading: The Empiricists (Anchor, 1961); The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, ed. by Margaret Atherton (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Encyclopedia of Empiricism, ed. by Don Garrett and Edward Barbanell (Greenwood, 1997); and Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Temple, 1992).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names]
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