Philosophy

Gottfried Leibniz, like Descartes, contributed well to mathematics as he did to philosophy. Albeit he was a rationalist, he thought that rationality wasn’t enough to justify pure reason and that knowledge must be obtained from the external world too. He identified two...

Advances during the Enlightenment period had a very different influence on British philosophy from that of continental Europe. In reaction against the rationalism of Cartesianism, Spinozism, and Leibnizianism, British philosophers rejected the idea that reason is the...

Hobbes took an active interest throughout his life in the scientific discoveries of his era. Although he wrote about many subjects, he spent much of his career writing about science. His views on religion were influenced by the ideas of Isaac Newton, whose work had...

Descartes thought animals were just like us, except lacking consciousness. He called them “automata”: machines that could not think, feel or act independently. Hobbes disagreed, claiming that animals were actually thinking beings and that they had free will. In his...

As Hobbes prepared the grassroots for empiricism, John Locke was the first to conceive its arguments. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argued that all knowledge comes from experiences. Locke’s epistemology is built around a strict distinction...

George Berkeley proposed an extreme version of atomistic philosophy and counter-arguments Locke’s theory to an extreme of ‘immaterialism’ that rejected the existence of matter, arguing that the only thing that exists is ideas or the perceptions of those ideas. For him...

David Hume was an English philosopher who lived during the 18th century. He believed that all ideas come from sense impressions. He also thought that every idea had its own reality, that we could never know if two ideas were exactly alike or not since empirical...

For Leibniz, the truth of an analytic statement depends on its meaning, but for Hume, the truth of a synthetic statement does not depend on any external conditions or circumstances. Hume built on the works of Leibniz and distinguished between analytic statements...

In the 18th Century, David Hume made an observation about causality and induction. We can't say with absolute certainty that there is cause and effect, so we must try to figure out what we think caused the event, and then apply that to future events. If we're wrong,...

Several empiricists, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and others, thought that common sense was a fundamental tool for making philosophical judgments, which they considered could never be justified logically. The appeal of British empiricism lies in...