Empiricism

Utilitarianism extends the British empiricism of Locke and Hume: all knowledge, moral as well as factual, derives from experience, from the observation of pleasures, pains and consequences. No innate ideas, no a priori truths: the mind starts from the sensible, and the calculation of observable effects replaces the rational deduction of principles.

Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, A System of Logic

Since every rational deduction of the essence of things runs aground on the equipollence of doctrines, all that remains for conduct is what imposes itself without asking our leave: sensory appearances and phenomena. The skeptic does not erect them into a source of truth; he undergoes them as a purely practical criterion, enough to act on without asserting anything. Sextus' epithet, the Empiricist, marks this reversal: no longer deducing the real from above, by speculative reason, but relying on the given, from below, without claiming to pierce its nature.

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21-24 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, IX, 105-106

Pragmatism is rooted in experience rather than pure reason: James develops a radical empiricism in which relations themselves are given within the flux of experience, and Dewey grounds all thought in the organism's transaction with its environment. Knowledge proceeds from experimentation and its observable consequences, in the lineage of British empiricism, which it extends while ridding it of the idea of an inert sense datum.

James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) · Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)

Antisthenes, the cynics' forerunner, opposes Platonism with a radical nominalism: I can see a horse, but not horseness. Only sensible individuals exist, grasped by perception; general Ideas are empty words. The knowledge that counts is taken from experience and concrete practice, not from the contemplation of intelligible essences.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI · Simplicius, Commentary on the Categories

Historical materialism derives knowledge from material conditions and social activity, not from first ideas: it is life that determines consciousness, not the reverse. Against passive empiricism as much as against idealism, knowledge is worked out in praxis, the practical, transforming relation of human beings to their world.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology · Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Buddhism makes personal examination and direct experience, not authority or tradition, the source of liberating knowledge. Decisive knowledge proceeds from a perception refined by meditation, more than from a priori intellection: one tests for oneself the root of suffering and its cessation, as one verifies a remedy by applying it.

Kalama Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya III.65) · Satipatthana Sutta

Confucian knowledge is won through study, observation and the imitation of the ancients, not through innate ideas. To learn is to steep oneself in the texts, the rites and the examples, a patient formation through experience and tradition rather than through rational deduction; the Master himself claims to be not one born wise, but a lover of antiquity, quick to seek it there.

Analects (Lunyu), VII.1 and VII.20 · Analects, II.15

Taoism is wary of conceptual, bookish knowledge, which carves up and names while the Tao exceeds all speech: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. True knowledge is not rational accumulation but unlearning and intuitive accord with the course of things, a knowing of the concrete and the spontaneous, closer to lived experience than to discursive reason.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 1 and 48 · Zhuangzi

The movement privileges concrete existence, lived in the first person, against the abstract rational systems that claim to deduce everything (Hegel): the truth that commits is grasped in the situation, in anguish, in choice, not in a disembodied reason. It is not for all that an empiricism of facts, and the figures diverge, which keeps the movement near the median, leaning slightly toward lived experience.

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript · Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

In the empiricist line of Locke and Hume, Bentham holds real only what can be observed and measured, and suspects any term that answers to no sensible entity. This drives his critique of fictions: an expression like natural right claims to name a thing while no fact corresponds to it, and is merely a word with which a demand is cloaked rather than justified. His method is thus resolutely inductive and naturalistic, anchored in the experience of pleasures and pains rather than in a priori rational principles, and it is on that ground that he dismisses natural rights.

Anarchical Fallacies (natural rights, nonsense upon stilts)

Heir to Antisthenes and his nominalism, Diogenes recognises only sensible individuals and holds Plato's general Ideas to be empty words: "I can see a table and a cup, ran this line of thought, but not tablehood or cuphood". The knowledge that counts is taken from experience and concrete practice, not from the contemplation of intelligible essences. It is a nominalist empiricism, more polemical than systematic.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 53

Against the idealism that derives the real from ideas, Marx roots knowledge in material conditions and social activity: one starts from what human beings do and produce, not from what they imagine. Yet he also rejects the contemplative empiricism of the old materialism, which passively receives the sensory given: to know is a praxis, an active and transforming relation to the world. The source stays on the side of experience, but reworked through practice rather than through pure reason.

Theses on Feuerbach, I and V · The German Ideology, I

Montaigne distrusts abstract reasonings, which can prove a thing and its opposite, and prefers to them the teaching of experience: the last essay, "Of Experience", makes patient commerce with things and with oneself the only accessible wisdom. He builds no empiricist system, but his leaning is clear, to know is to have lived, observed and tested rather than to have deduced. Reason remains "a two-handled pot, that one can grasp by the left or the right", too pliant to ground knowledge on its own.

Essays, III, 13, "Of Experience" and II, 12

A physician of the Empiric school, nicknamed "the Empiric", Sextus takes as his sole guide in life what shows itself: the phenomena (phainomena), the affections, the repeated observation proper to the arts. But this empiricism carries no dogma: he does not assert that the senses deliver the real, only that they deliver what appears, the one ground on which the skeptic consents to move. Against the rationalism that claims to infer the hidden from signs, he refuses any passage from the apparent to the non-apparent. His leaning is thus empiricist, but held short of the extreme, for he founds no theory of knowledge at all.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21-24 (the criterion of the phenomenon) · Against the Mathematicians, VIII (Against the Logicians)

A phenomenologist, Beauvoir holds knowledge to be rooted in lived, embodied experience: the body is not one object among others but the situated standpoint from which the world takes on meaning. Her method, in The Second Sex, starts from concrete data, biology, history, testimony, rather than from a rational principle laid down a priori. This sets her on the side of experience, without making her a classical empiricist, since experience is always that of a freedom in situation.

The Second Sex, Introduction · The Ethics of Ambiguity

Liberating knowledge is established neither by scriptural authority nor by rational speculation, but by examination and direct experience: the Buddha invites one to test for oneself, come and see, and decisive knowledge arises from a perception refined by meditation. The source is therefore experiential, though this experience includes contemplative insight and not the five senses alone.

Kalama Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya) · Satipatthana Sutta (the foundations of mindfulness)

The knowledge that matters is not the discursive knowing that defines and argues, but an embodied skill acquired through repeated dealings with things: the butcher, the wheelwright, the swimmer could not explain their art, and yet they possess it to their fingertips. This primacy of practical experience and direct contact over abstract reasoning leans to the empirical side, but it is an empiricism of the gesture rather than of the senses, with no theory of perception as a source of true propositions.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 13 (Wheelwright Bian)

Confucian knowledge is won by assiduous study of the Ancients, observation and practical experience, joined to reflection: learning without thought is vain, thought without learning is perilous. Knowledge is not pure speculation but wisdom to be applied, anchored in tradition and the scrutiny of the real, hence an empiricist leaning tempered by the demand for reflection.

Analects, II, 15 (learning without thought, thought without learning) · Analects, VII, 8 and II, 17 (active study; knowing what one knows and does not know)

Epictetus' whole discipline bears on impressions (phantasiai): they impose themselves on us from outside, sensory material we do not choose, but the sage's proper work is their use and the assent one grants or withholds. The source of the material is empirical; right knowledge depends on the correctness of the judgment that sorts it, which keeps Epictetus on the side of experience without abolishing the share of reason.

Discourses, I, 27 and II, 18 · Enchiridion, 1 and 5

Peirce is a scientist for whom all knowledge is tested against experience, and doubt itself arises only from a sensible jolt, never from a decision of the mind: the bent is clearly empiricist. But he refuses the atomist empiricism of pure sensation and restores to inference, logic and real generalities a constitutive role, abduction introducing ideas no observation contains. Neither blank slate nor innatism: an empiricism tempered by logic, nearer to criticism than to Hume.

Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)

Sartre's phenomenological ontology starts from the lived experience of consciousness, anguish, nausea, the look of the other, rather than from rational deductions or pure sensory facts. Consciousness is from the outset an intentional relation to the concrete world, and it is by describing it that one knows it. But the pre-reflective cogito remains a Cartesian-type foothold, which keeps Sartre near the median, leaning slightly toward described experience.

Being and Nothingness, Introduction · The Imaginary

Primacy goes to intuition: the concept only fixes and stores, in abstract coin, what perception alone first gives; discursive reason is sterile away from that source. But intuition is itself already shaped by the a priori structures inherited from Kant, hence a mixed position that leans toward empiricism without belonging to it.

The World as Will and Representation, Book I

Odysseus's knowledge comes not from pure reasoning but from experience of the world: the proem praises him for having seen the cities of many men and known their minds. It is by roaming, undergoing, observing that he learns, each ordeal adding to his knowledge of men and things. His intelligence is that of one who has seen much, not of one who has deduced much.

Odyssey, I, 3 (the proem)