Empiricism covers a range of views prioritizing experience as the primary source of knowledge. During the Early Modern Period, this view was expounded by the so-called British Empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—who sought to replace the appeal to authority with an alternative epistemological foundation, articulated in conjunction with a particular view about mental content.
According to John Locke (1632–1704), we only have knowledge through direct awareness, and the only direct awareness are our ideas, which are mental representations of external reality. More complex knowledge can be constructed from simpler ideas, and instances of apparently non-empirical knowledge (such as mathematics) were dismissed as the purely formal relationships that exist between our ideas. One central problem with the view, however, concerns how mental ideas can accurately represent non-mental objects. As a result, George Berkeley (1685–1753) concluded that we could only have reliable knowledge if the external world were also composed of mental ideas, and David Hume (1711–1776) concluded that we cannot have reliable knowledge at all.
Empiricism is usually contrasted with Rationalism, which posits a more extensive role for non-empirical knowledge. It was the attempt to find a compromise between the Rationalism and Empiricism that motivated Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
