Empiricists

A close reading of the three canonical British empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—built around the question of what the mind can actually know once we accept that all our ideas trace back to experience. You'll work through the primary texts themselves rather than secondary summaries, and most of your grade comes from three term essays where you reconstruct an argument and defend a position on it. It pairs with the Rationalists course as the other half of early modern philosophy, and the problems raised here (causality, personal identity, the limits of perception) are the ones Kant is reacting to in the courses that follow.