The Empiricists

"One of the great historic controversies in philosophy", is how Bertrand Russell described the ideological conflict between rationalists and empiricists - the conflict between reason and experience as the primary source of knowledge and ideas. In this study, however, R.S. Woolhouse is less concerned to justify these traditional labels than to set forth the dominant philosophical ideas and let them speak for themselves. The book concentrates on the major "empiricist" figures - Locke, Berkeley, and Hume - but complete chapters are also devoted to the unjustly neglected French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and to the members of the Royal Society, founded in the 1660s.