John Locke’s claims about relations (such as cause and effect) and mixed modes (such as beauty and murder) have been controversial since the publication of the Essay. His earliest critics read him as a thoroughgoing anti-realist who denies that such things exist. More charitable readers have sought to read Locke’s claims away. Against both, I argue that Locke is making ontological claims, but that his views do not have the absurd consequences his defenders fear. By examining Locke’s texts, as well (...) as the intellectual context in which they were written, I show that Locke’s position is at once radical and thoroughly traditional. (shrink)

Es muy habitual que se presenten los grandes lineamientos de la filosofía moderna en el marco del paradigma epistemológico y apelando a la distinción de dos corrientes filosóficas fundamentales, el empirismo y el racionalismo. Se trata de categorías analíticas construidas para interpretar y caracterizar retrospectivamente a ciertos filósofos de la modernidad. Pero no fueron términos ni conceptos utilizados por los actores mismos6. John Locke, George Berkeley y David Hume no se llamaban a sí mismos empiristas, ni René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza (...) y Gottfried W. Leibniz se autodenominaban racionalistas. En este capítulo, profundizaremos algunos puntos esbozados en el capítulo anterior. En primer lugar, expondremos las definiciones que han recibido el empirismo y el racionalismo dentro del paradigma epistemológico, que si bien ha sido criticado y redefinido en las últimas décadas, sigue siendo sostenido en la actualidad. En esa misma sección, analizaremos en qué medida las figuras del canon moderno establecido por el paradigma sostienen o no las tesis racionalistas y empiristas que les atribuyen esas definiciones tradicionales. Finalmente, resumiremos algunas críticas que ha recibido la narrativa tradicional y presentaremos una propuesta de resignificación de ambas categorías que nos parece más atinada. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, “empiricism” is a label that usually denotes an epistemological view that emphasizes the role that experience plays in forming concepts and acquiring and justifying knowledge. In contemporary philosophy, there are some authors who call themselves as empiricists, although there are differences in the way they define what experience consists in, how it is related to theory, and the role experience plays in discovering and justifying knowledge, etc. (e.g., Ayer 1936; Van Fraassen 2002). In contrast, in the early modern (...) period, empiricism was not a label that philosophers traditionally characterized until nowadays as empiricists (most famously, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) used to describe their doctrines. Indeed, as attributed to early modern philosophical authors, empiricism is not an actor’s category, but an analytic historiographical category retrospectively applied to them and confronted to rationalism, whose main representatives were considered to be Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G.W. Leibniz. Such a narrative began to be established by the late nineteenthcentury and described early modern empiricism as an epistemological stance maintaining (1) that the origin of all mental contents lies in experience (a genetic statement), and (2) that knowledge can only be justified a posteriori (an epistemic statement). This entails that empiricists deny the existence of innate mental contents and the possibility of a purely a priori knowledge. In the history of early modern science such a dichotomy has been usually rendered in terms of the opposition between continental rationalist Cartesian science vs British empiricist Newtonian science. In the last four decades, many aspects of this traditional narrative have been criticized, and the meaning of early modern empiricism is subject of renewed studies. (shrink)