Empiricism

(Gr. empeiria , experience), the philosophical theory according to which sense-experience is the source of all knowledge, i.e. that we can investigate the world only through 231 the experience of our senses. It denies the existence of any a prior i po ibility of knowledge, and maintains that the mind is at first a tabula ras a , a clean slate, upon which all the characters are inscribed by experience. The term empiricism is, however, now applied to any philosophical system which finds all its material in experience. The philosophy of empiricism has been particularly developed by English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, such as Locke, Hume, and J. S. Mill. John Locke was the first to expre the view in a systematic form. Among more modern empiricists are William James and John Dewey.— Bibliography : Green, Prolegomena to Ethics ; James, E ays in Radical Empiricism .