Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (
2020)
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Abstract
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.