The British Empiricists

Stephen Priest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134248322
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Empiricists represent the central tradition in British philosophy as well as some of the most important and influential thinkers in human history. Their ideas paved the way for modern thought from politics to science, ethics to religion. The British Empiricists is a wonderfully clear and concise introduction to the lives, careers and views of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell, and Ayer.

Stephen Priest examines each philosopher and their views on a wide range of topics including mind and matter, ethics and emotions, freedom and the physical world, language, truth and logic. The book is usefully arranged so that it can be read by thinker or by topic, or as a history of key philosophical problems and equips the reader to:

• recognize and practice philosophical thinking
• understand the methods of solving philosophical problems used by the British Empiricists
• appreciate the role of empiricism in the history of Western philosophy.

For any student new to philosophy, Western philosophy or the British Empiricists, this masterly survey offers an accessible engaging introduction.

1
WHAT IS EMPIRICISM?

DOING PHILOSOPHY AND DOING HISTORY

Philosophy is the attempt to answer philosophical questions. To illustrate this definition I provide examples of questions which are not philosophical and contrast them with questions which are. 7 + 5 = ? is not a philosophical question but an arithmetical one. We can answer it by doing arithmetic. Do numbers exist? and If numbers exist, where are they? are not arithmetical questions but philosophical questions. Doing more arithmetic will not answer them. What were the causes of the Civil War? is a historical question. To address it, we inspect documents or read books. What exactly is the relation between C and E, if C is the cause of E? is a philosophical question. Doing extra history is not going to answer it. What were you doing before you were reading this? and What are you thinking now? are ordinary, commonsensical questions. You can answer them by consulting your memory, or by swiftly introspecting. Was there a first event?, What is the relationship between consciousness and the brain? and Why is it now now? are philosophical questions. Thinking no further than the requirements of commonsense practicality is not going to answer them.

Although mathematics is the study of number, history the study of the past and physics the study of matter, philosophy is not distinguished by having a particular subject matter. Philosophical questions might be about numbers, consciousness, matter, right and wrong, surfaces, points, society, death, your own existence or anything else.¹ Philosophy is not defined by what it is about.

What, then, do philosophical questions have in common that makes them philosophical? A philosophical question is one we have no method for answering. Contrary to popular belief, plenty of us might know the answers to some philosophical questions. For example: if two people sincerely present arguments for and against the existence of God then, perhaps surprisingly, one of them knows whether there is a God. The fact that it is hard to know which knows does not show that neither knows.²

There is an infinite number of philosophical questions. A small sample is: am I wholly physical?, Could I do other than what I do?, Why is there something rather than nothing?, Is a physical object really a kind of process?, Is the world as it appears through the senses?, Why is someone you?, Do space and time exist?, If so, what are they?, Is there life after death?, Is there a genuine distinction between right and wrong?, Can art be anything?³

We may also correctly define ‘philosophy’ as the attempt to solve philosophical problems, for example problems about: free will and determinism, personal identity, the existence of God, physical objects, causation, numbers, the problem of being, the mind–body problem, the problem of being someone, problems of meaning, aesthetics, ethics. The two definitions of ‘philosophy’ are equivalent because any problem may be rewritten as a question and vice versa.

Philosophy is not its history. Doing philosophy is not doing history. Suppose we were not doing philosophy but writing a novel. In writing the novel, we would not have to begin by including a précis of Jane Austen and continue by explaining how Dickens’s novels are an expression of nineteenth-century urban reality. We might of course do this because, like philosophy, a novel can be about anything but, paradigmatically, writing a novel is not writing a history of the novel. Suppose we were not doing philosophy but doing physics. In trying to solve problems in physics we do not historically reconstruct the professional conflicts, or library facilities, which influenced Sir Isaac Newton in devising his mechanics in the late seventeenth century. Doing physics is not writing a history of physics. It follows that philosophy is not unique in not being its history.

Nevertheless, the history of philosophy can be studied as philosophy or as history. Studied as history it is part of the history of ideas: the history of those ideas that are philosophical. It needs a historian to do it. The history of ideas is the attempt to reconstruct as accurately as possible what was thought in a historical period. Success entails thinking in the present what was thought in the past: thinking thoughts numerically distinct from but qualitatively identical to past thoughts.⁴ Attention is paid to the biography of the author, their correspondence, the politics, economics and languages of the time. Past mentalities are imaginatively entered, to appreciate ways of thinking and perceiving often remote from our own. Legitimate issues in the history of ideas include whether the work of a philosopher is an ideological expression of an epoch or breaks free of its assumptions through originality, criticism or deconditioning.

In studying the history of philosophy as philosophy, when a text was written or who wrote it, under what pressures, count for precisely nothing. In doing philosophy we are trying to solve philosophical problems. In doing the history of philosophy as philosophy we are reading philosophers, who happen to have written in the past, for answers to philosophical questions and arguments for those answers. We are deliberately and self-consciously using them. If there is a ‘context’ of a claim in the history of philosophy as philosophy it is the set of arguments for and against a putative answer to a philosophical question.

It would be a misunderstanding of what philosophy is to confine ourselves to critiques that occurred historically. Anything that contributes to solving a problem should be drawn upon, whether written in ancient Greece two and a half millennia ago or said in Oxford or New York today. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) explicitly penned New Essays on Human Understanding (1705) to refute the central claims of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by the English philosopher and political theorist John Locke (1632–1704), but there is no philosophical reason to restrict the philosophical debate to that historical debate. We should draw on the thought of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Stephen Stich or anyone else who we can use to solve the problems.

Although philosophy is not history, history matters to philosophy in two ways. First: a question is philosophical in relation to the presence or absence of an established method for addressing it. A method might exist in one period but not another, so some questions might be philosophical for the Pre-Socratics but not for us. Second: the period in which the philosopher thinks conditions his techniques of problem-solving. The conditioning of the philosopher constrains what passes for a problem and what passes for an explanation. It suggests what is important and what is to be eschewed. For example, in contemporary Western philosophy, the mystery of one’s own existence is largely missed and the paradigms of explanation are scientific explanations. Human, especially scientific, developments raise philosophical problems. I take it as completely obvious that there is no discussion of the ethics of nuclear warfare before the invention of a capacity for nuclear warfare. The issue of primary and secondary qualities, in particular the ontological status of colours, arises conspicuously after the advent of modern (Galilean) science in the seventeenth century. (The idea that objects might not be really coloured does not seem to be a problem that much exercised pre- Galilean Aristotelians.) Einstein’s discovery of special and general relativity, and the ‘spatialising’ of time as the ‘fourth dimension’ has raised problems in the philosophy of space and time, especially about simultaneity.

Nevertheless, it would be a rash historian who assumed there were no anticipations of these problems. (Someone influenced by Richard Rorty once said to me that the mind–body problem was not addressed by anyone before Descartes. Clearly they had not read Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and many others.)

Good philosophy breaks out of conditioned paradigms. This is in the nature of philosophy because its questions, by definition, cannot be answered by the methods of the given thought-world. This is why great philosophers are precisely not reflections of the ideologies or economics of their age. That we assume they are is a measure of our own conditioning.

One of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy is causing people to see the problem. If you are only having thoughts you have had already, you are not doing philosophy. Doing philosophy, is, in a sense, going against the grain of history.

The only philosophical reason for studying the history of philosophy as philosophy is: it is a concentration of what has been said in answer to philosophical questions. The history of philosophy is a resource for problem-solving. It should be treated with caution, because fluency in previous ways of thinking can inculcate habits of thought inimical to problem-solving, as well as valuable insights, arguments and problems.

In The British Empiricists, the overwhelming emphasis is on the history of philosophy as philosophy. The only concessions to the history of ideas are some historical observations later in this introduction, and an opening biographical section in each chapter. These sections are included in the book for historians of ideas not for philosophers. Although the history of ideas is immensely educative, it belongs to history and this is a philosophy book.

If a philosophical question is one we have no method of answering, then doing philosophy entails devising methods of problem-solving.

Contrary to popular belief, empiricists disagree radically between themselves over the answers to philosophical questions, so no agreement about answers distinguishes them as empiricists. So, can ‘empiricism’ be defined?

DEFINING ‘EMPIRICISM’

Empiricism is the thesis that there is no a priori metaphysical knowledge and all concepts are derived from experience. Empiricism therefore entails that there is no knowledge unless there is empirical knowledge.

Empiricism in itself entails no distinctive ontology. For example, empiricism is prima facie consistent with idealism, materialism, dualism, neutral monism, theism, atheism, conservatism and liberalism.

Idealism is the thesis that either only consciousness exists or everything depends on consciousness. For example, if numbers, physical objects and events exist, they logically depend on consciousness. Consciousnesses are the only substances. The Anglican Irish bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) is an empiricist and an idealist.

Materialism is the thesis that if something exists it is physical. For example, the claim that there are only physical objects and the claim that there are only physical events are both materialist claims. If there seem to be non-physical things, for example: numbers, minds, then these logically depend upon physical things. Physical things are the only substances. The English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is an empiricist and a materialist.

Dualism (or mind–body dualism) is the thesis that both consciousness and physical things exist and neither can be reduced to the other. Any substance is either a consciousness or a physical thing but not both. Locke is an empiricist and a dualist.

Neutral monism is the thesis that mental and physical are two aspects of some underlying reality that in itself is neither mental nor physical. The only substance, or kind of substance, is both mental and physical so no substance is only mental or only physical. The English philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) is an empiricist and a neutral monist.

Theism is the thesis that God exists. Atheism is the thesis that God does not exist. Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley are empiricists and theists. The Scottish philosopher, historian and political theorist David Hume (1711–1786), the English philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and Russell are empiricists and atheists.⁵ The English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) regards each of theism and atheism as neither true nor false, and so equally nonsensical.

Liberalism is the thesis that the freedom of the individual, compatible with a similar freedom for others, is the overriding political value. Locke, Mill and Russell are liberals.

Conservatism is the thesis that the family, law and order, cultural traditions and a minimal state are necessary for the degree of real, practical, freedom that is possible in human society. Hume is a conservative.

Empiricists are not distinguished from other kinds of philosopher by what they think exists or does not exist. Ontology does not settle whether a doctrine is empiricist because empiricism is a kind of epistemology. Empiricism is often defined as the doctrine that knowledge is ‘based on’ experience but ‘based on’ is a spatial metaphor and clear philosophy is literal. I suggest knowledge is ‘based on’ experience if and only if experience is necessary for knowledge. Many empiricists think there is a priori knowledge: knowledge dependent on no experience except that necessary for the acquisition of the concepts for its formulation. That is consistent with ‘knowledge is based on experience’ as defined. That experience is sufficient for knowledge is an empiricist thesis and ‘based on’ fails to capture this. For example, if experiencing is itself a kind of knowing then experience is sufficient for some knowledge. For example, Russell thinks experience of something provides knowledge of it ‘by acquaintance’ so, if he is right, experience is sufficient for that knowledge.⁶

The term ‘empiricism’ derives from the Greek empeiron ‘experienced’ which partly derives from peira: ‘to try’, ‘to test’. Philosophical etymologies, although fascinating, need to be treated with immense caution because ‘What did it mean?’ and ‘What does it mean?’ are distinct questions, even if they sometimes have the same answer. (Having the same answer is insufficient for being the same question. Think how many questions are rightly answered ‘Yes’.) Nevertheless, in this etymology, two leitmotifs of empiricism are apparent: all concepts are acquired from experience and all non-tautological claims need to be tested against experience, not simply endorsed as dogma. The second of these rules out synthetic a priori knowledge that is metaphysical.

ANTS AND SPIDERS

Empiricism is the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism is the thesis that there is a priori metaphysical knowledge, or some concepts are not derived from experience, or both. Rationalism entails that there could be some knowledge even if there were no empirical knowledge.

No matter how many a posteriori claims some philosophy entails, entailment of just one a priori metaphysical proposition ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: WHAT IS EMPIRICISM?
• 2: HOBBES
• 3: LOCKE
• 4: BERKELEY
• 5: HUME
• 6: MILL
• 7: RUSSELL
• 8: AYER
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY