Empiricism

Undergraduate

holds that all human knowledge comes from experience, and it has a long history extending arguably from Aristotle to the present. The "British Empiricists" -- Locke, Berkeley and Hume -- crystallized empiricist concerns in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This course explores themes and problems in early modern empiricism such as: the theory of ideas, the nature of body, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, causation, induction, personal identity, and human agency.