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Hume - british empiricists' favourite
Locke: 1632-1753 : first empiricist
1960s downgrading of Rationalism ... spinoza and liebnitz
Empiricists think that knowledge is a function of experience
Early Wittgenstein vs. later Wittgenstein
Tractatus logico philosophy
Height of british empiricism
Thought he had solved all the problems of philosphy... became a gardener and preschool teacher... where he realised he had been completely wrong
Went and got his old job at cambridge back - whereupon russell great empiricist thought he had just lost the plot
A J Ayer - language truth and logic
Vienna circle
British empiricism leads to the destructuion of rationalist metaphysics
Philosophers should be content with gardeners tidying up the garden constructed by science
Verifyability of meaning
You must be able to point to the criteria which would make it either false or true... otherwise it is not even true or false... it is meaningless
Liebnitz - logician - and Spinoza - nice chap -were examples of meaningless
Anything that can't be translated into propositions referring to sense data are meaningless
End of rationalist metaphysics
Verification theory of meaning - Wikipedia
Quine - philosphy continuous with other subjects
Two Dogmas of Empiricism - Wikipedia
#Galileo - inventing a new physics to replace aristotelian physics
Colours are not in the world - rather they are in our perceptions of the world ... similarly sound, smell etc.
Scientific revolution
Distinguish physical sensations we have from objects in the world
Bracket sensations... Instead consider Physical events in the world (not a sensation) that #cause us to have these sensations.
Give mathematical description to the movements of matter
Whitehead: Universe without us is a dull soundless scentless colourless afair
Our brains are mapping events on our retina and inner ear etc.
Base 1
Descates - kind of platonist - rationalist
Base 2
Locke
Tabula Rasa - born with a blank slate mind - we get everything from experience
No concepts in the mind at birth
Primary and Secondary qualities "powers" ...
Primary qualities are things like the size of the chair, number of chairs
Secondary qualities are things to small to be directly perceived but have a consequence in perception...
eg. light waves giving rise to colour... we don't perceive the light rays, only the result of the light rays eg. the chair being blue
Base 3
Hume - british empiricists' favourite
Locke: 1632-1753 : first empiricist
What do we know directly in a non-mediated fashion?
Ideas of objects and events as they are represented in our minds
Base 4
Ideas in the mind
If all we know directly is ideas in the mind, how do we know the world is the way we perceive it
Steps to British empiricism
Leads to #Scepticism
Hume (1711-1776)
"Mitigated sceptic" British empirist ... instinct tells us the world really exists even though we can't philosophically prove it
Came logically before Berkeley, but datewise came after
Berkeley (1685-1753)
Common sense is correct... when I say I know the world exists
Everything is a set of sensory experiences
Esse est percipi ... To be is to be perceived ... this is what we mean by existence
Common sense anti-scepticism
Everything is perceive by #God even when not being percieved by a person
Kant - distinguish noumena from phenomena
Aside
Berkeley "awakened Kant"
I know the world exists because i can see it, touch it, hear it, taste it
#No... i know the world exists because i can #act it in it
Andrew chanelling Heidegger
Not objects that give us sense data, it is sense data that gives rise to objects.
J.S. Mill (1806-1873)
Continued existence amounts to: the permanent possibility of perception
Phenomenalism - everything exists as sense data
#Phenomenalism
Everything can be described in terms of sense data
#Phenomenalists #became #logical #positivists
Sense data
Actual and potential sense data
Objects
What sense data underly the verifiability theory of meaning?
#Problems
What about quarks? What is a quark as sense data?
Scientific instrumentalism (response to verifiability theory of meaning)
Scientific realism
Do atoms exist?
Carmen Revelli ... Book about time
Einstein thought of time as being what clocks do
Popper
Falsification demarcation
Problem of induction
#Marx, #Freud and initially #Darwin all branded as #unfalsifiable
So verifiabilty theory of meaning leads either to scientific instrumentalism or to ?
Falsifiability theory of meaning ...
Hegel, Neitzche
Whole other tradition branches off here
Husserl, Heidegger
Distinguish phenomenalism from phenomenology...
Related links
#Melvyn-Bragg and guests discuss #Empiricism , England’s greatest contribution to philosophy.
Empiricism - Wikipedia