Since the beginning of the twentieth century, empiricism has been construed predominantly as a response to sceptically driven problems in epistemology, one that is the mirror image of rationalism, with which it shares an epistemological agenda, and with which it is in direct competition. This is not the only way of thinking of empiricism. From the perspective of the development of empiricism in the eighteenth century, it does not correspond to how those identified as its greatest proponents—notably Locke and Hume—conceived of its scope and aims. In what follows, I want to sketch an alternative account. I want to explore empiricism as a successor to, and philosophical refinement of, seventeenth-century ‘experimental’ natural philosophy, something that was intimately tied up with natural-philosophical practice, and was quite distinct from the speculative epistemology to which it was reduced in the ‘rationalism/empiricism’ debates. Moreover, as it matured, empiricism offered a form of naturalism that was distinctive in that it rejected the attempts to assimilate all cognitive enquiry to a form of physics-inspired natural philosophy. This is an important dimension of empiricism, one missed if it is viewed in rationalist/empiricist terms.
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