This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac. While space is a central and challenging issue for early modern empiricists, literature on this topic is sparse. This collection shows the diversity and problematic unity of empiricist views of space. Despite their common attention to the content of sensorial experience and to the analytical method, empiricist theories of space vary widely both in the way of approaching the issue and in the result of their investigation. However, by recasting the questions and examining the conceptual shifts, we see the emergence of a programmatic core, common to what the authors discuss. The introductory chapter describes this variety and its common core. The other contributions provide more specific perspectives on the issue of space within the philosophical literature. This book offers a unique overview of the early modern understanding of these issues, of interest to historians of early modern philosophy, historians and philosophers of science, historians of ideas, and all readers who want to expand their knowledge of the empiricist tradition.

This volume of original papers by a leading team of international scholars explores Isaac Newton's relation to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists. It includes studies of Newton's experimental methods in optics and their roots in Bacon and Boyle; Locke's and Hume's responses to Newton on the nature of matter, time, the structure of the sciences, and the limits of human inquiry. In addition it explores the use of Newtonian ideas in 18th-century pedagogy and the life sciences. Finally, it breaks new ground in analyzing the method of evidential reasoning heralded by the Principia, its nature, strength, and development in the subsequent three centuries of gravitational research. The volume will be of interest to historians of science and philosophy and philosophers interested in the nature of empiricism.

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Presenting the history of space-time physics, from Newton to Einstein, as a philosophical development DiSalle reflects our increasing understanding of the connections between ideas of space and time and our physical knowledge. He suggests that philosophy's greatest impact on physics has come about, less by the influence of philosophical hypotheses, than by the philosophical analysis of concepts of space, time and motion, and the roles they play in our assumptions about physical objects and physical measurements. This way of thinking leads to interpretations of the work of Newton and Einstein and the connections between them. It also offers ways of looking at old questions about a priori knowledge, the physical interpretation of mathematics, and the nature of conceptual change. Understanding Space-Time will interest readers in philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and physics, as well as readers interested in the relations between physics and philosophy.

Wayne Waxman here presents an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to link the philosophers of what are known as the British Empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--to the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Much has been written about all these thinkers, who are among the most influential figures in the Western tradition. Waxman argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant is actually the culmination of the British empiricist program and that he shares their methodological assumptions and basic convictions about human thought and knowledge.

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.

Logical empiricism, a program for the study of science that attempted to provide logical analyses of the nature of scientific concepts, the relation between evidence and theory, and the nature of scientific explanation, formed among the famed Vienna and Berlin Circles of the 1920s and '30s and dominated the philosophy of science throughout much of the twentieth century. In recent decades, a "post-positivist" philosophy, deriding empiricism and its claims in light of more recent historical and sociological discoveries, has been the ascendant mode of philosophy and other disciplines in the arts and sciences.This book features original research that challenges such broad oppositions. In eleven essays, leading scholars from many nations construct a more nuanced understanding of logical empiricism, its history, and development, offering promising implications for current philosophy of science debates.Tapping rich resources of unpublished material from archives in Haarlem, Konstanz, Pittsburgh, and Vienna, contributors conduct a deep investigation into the origins and development of the Vienna and Berlin Circles. They expose the roots of the philosophy in such varied sources as Cassirer, Poincaire, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Important connections between the empiricists and other movements—neo-empiricism, British empiricism—are vigorously explored.Building on these historical studies, a critical reevaluation emerges that shrinks the distance between old and new philosophers of science, between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy. A number of compelling recent debates, including those involving Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hesse, Glymour, and Hanson, are reopened to show the ways in which logical empiricist theory can still be validly applied.Logical Empiricism is the result of a remarkable conference, convened in the spirit of reflection and international cooperation, that took place in Florence, Italy, in 1999.