David Hume and the Rise of Empiricism

Hume: Edinburgh, 1711

Empiricism, the philosophical movement that dominated British philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, shared a common goal with rationalism: to provide philosophy with a method that would allow it to achieve the same success as the science of the time, spurred by Newton’s recent discoveries.

The England in which empiricism developed was marked by disputes between supporters of Parliament and defenders of absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie favored a Parliament that would diminish differences with the nobility, who still maintained their medieval privileges. This confrontation became a Civil War and ended with the execution of King Charles I and the proclamation of the Republic. After several years, the Republic was dissolved to make way for a return to absolute monarchy, which was later replaced by a parliamentary and constitutional monarchy led by William of Orange in what is known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This new monarchy led England to become a world power. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment movement, an intellectual current inherited from Renaissance humanism, spread throughout Europe. It laid the ideological basis for the various revolutions that occurred throughout this century and beyond.

For the empiricists, the scientific revolution carried out by Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo was very important. Rationalists were influenced by the importance of the search for an accurate method for reason, since it is the indispensable key to finding innate ideas, while the empiricists, influenced by physics, believed that the mind itself contains nothing.

Empiricist philosophy championed the idea that reason relied on sensory data to achieve knowledge; in other words, it depended on experience, and this became the criterion of truth. The precedents of this philosophy reside in the empiricist tradition, whose leading authors were Ockham, who claimed it was necessary to resort to experience in any research, and Francis Bacon, a defender of the inductive method. Besides this, empiricist authors shared other common characteristics: they denied the existence of innate ideas, studied human knowledge (its origin, limits, etc.), denied or acknowledged the difficulty of the existence of a valid metaphysics, and modeled themselves after experimental sciences like physics.

Rationalism vs. Empiricism

In contrast, rationalism, which prevailed in the rest of Europe, especially France, rejected the appeal to experience and placed reason at the forefront of knowledge. Rationalist authors, epitomized by Descartes, claimed the existence of innate ideas and used mathematical and logical deduction as their model of knowledge. Finally, it should be noted that, at the same time that empiricism was developing in England, a current emerged that sought to modernize and find new political theories for the organization of a liberal state.

David Hume’s Influence

Some of the most prominent empiricists were Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley; however, the most influential of these was David Hume. Originally from Edinburgh, he was a contemporary of Enlightenment authors such as Rousseau, Kant, Voltaire, and Diderot, and was also influenced by the Enlightenment movement. The central theme of his philosophy was knowledge, about which he wrote one of his most important works, “A Treatise of Human Nature.” Years later, he summarized the treatise in another work titled “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” with which he began to gain his first defenders and detractors. Throughout his life, his philosophy gradually radicalized, reaching ever higher levels of skepticism, and he came to reject metaphysics and the universal validity of science.

The Legacy of Empiricism

As for the influence of empiricism, the idea of equality between men allowed a change in the concept of the state, ushering in the defense of liberalism and some of the concepts introduced in today’s political systems, such as the division of powers or democracy. Hume’s criticism of metaphysics was the basis of positivism and neo-positivism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Years later, Kant was responsible for synthesizing rationalism and empiricism, joining both currents in a remarkable synthesis known as transcendental idealism.