Core Theses
There are no innate ideas; the mind at birth is a tabula rasa.
All ideas derive ultimately from sensation and reflection.
Knowledge of matters of fact is probable, never demonstrative.
Words that cannot be traced to experience are empty.
The great trio runs John Locke → George Berkeley → David Hume, and each step is more radical. Locke kept material substance as an unknowable “something I know not what.” Berkeley abolished matter (esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived). Hume abolished the self and necessary connection as well.
Empiricism’s endpoint in Hume was so corrosive that it forced Immanuel Kant‘s reply — and its spirit returned in the twentieth century as logical positivism.
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John Locke
Father of British empiricism and of liberalism — the mind begins as a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalTabula rasa
Origin. Roman wax tablets were scraped smooth to be reused. The image of the mind as a blank tablet goes back to Aristotle (De Anima III.4); Locke’s “white paper” made it the emblem of empiricism. — John Locke
⚠ Locke himself does not use the Latin phrase in the Essay; he says “white paper”.
For nurture versus nature, fresh starts, empiricism.
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related by shared connectionsThe Enlightenment
The eighteenth-century movement that put reason, science, tolerance and individual liberty at the centre of human affairs — “Sapere aude!”
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Universal genius — co-inventor of calculus, philosopher of monads and pre-established harmony — who argued that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant’s short, clearer restatement of the first Critique, where he credits Hume with waking him from his dogmatic slumber.
The Copernican Revolution
Kant’s reversal — instead of the mind conforming to objects, objects must conform to the mind’s forms of knowing.