Empiricist Metaphysics
For empiricists in England like
John Locke and
David Hume, metaphysics included the "primary" things beyond psychology and "secondary" sensory experiences. They denied that any knowledge was possible apart from experimental and mathematical reasoning. Hume thought the metaphysics of the Scholastics is sophistry and illusion.
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
(Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section XII)
Hume criticized the Theory of Ideas of his fellow British empiricists
John Locke and
George Berkeley. If, as they claim, knowledge is limited to perceptions of sense data, we cannot "know" anything about external objects, even our own bodies. But Hume said that we do have a
natural belief in the external world and causal laws.
Hume's idea of the
mind having a "feeling" (not a reason) that leads to natural beliefs became Kant's "second Copernican revolution" that the mind projects "concepts of the understanding" and "forms of perception" on the external world.
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