Most Famous Empiricism Philosophers

Empiricism is the philosophical view that experience, especially sense experience, is the primary source of human knowledge. Classical British empiricism, represented by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, rejected innate ideas and sought to derive all concepts from impressions of the world. Empiricist commitments shaped modern philosophy of science, including doctrines of induction, verification, and the rejection of metaphysical speculation. The position contrasts with rationalism, which assigns reason a more independent role in generating substantive knowledge. Logical empiricism in the twentieth century extended the tradition with formal tools.

Philosophers in this tradition

David Hume 1711 – 1776 · Scottish
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist of the Scottish Enlightenment. In A Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he ad...
George Berkeley 1685 – 1753 · Irish
George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop best known for his theory of immaterialism, sometimes called subjective idealism. His Principles of Human Know...
Francis Bacon 1561 – 1626 · English
Francis Bacon was a 16th and early 17th-century English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, regarded as one of the founders of the modern scientific method and a major figure ...
Joseph Priestley 1733 – 1804 · English
Joseph Priestley was an English natural philosopher, theologian, and political theorist, and one of the founding figures of English Unitarianism. Best known to the history of sc...
John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873 · British
John Stuart Mill was a 19th-century British philosopher and political economist, the most influential English-language thinker of the Victorian era. He refined and defended the ...
John Locke 1632 – 1704 · English
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding he argued tha...
Joseph Glanvill 1636 – 1680 · English
Joseph Glanvill was an English clergyman, philosopher, and an early Fellow of the Royal Society. After studies at Oxford he served as a country parson in Somerset and as chaplai...
Robert Boyle 1627 – 1691 · Anglo-Irish
Robert Boyle was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, and theologian and one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Sceptical Chymist helped to transform alchemy into...
William Paley 1743 – 1805 · English
William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, philosopher of religion, and moral philosopher and for half a century one of the most read writers in British religious thought....
Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882 · English
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist whose work transformed the life sciences and reshaped Western thought. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle furnished the observati...
Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903 · English
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist who set himself the task, in his ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy, of unifying biology, ...
John Toland 1670 – 1722 · Irish
John Toland was an Irish-born freethinker, political pamphleteer, and one of the most controversial English-language philosophers of the early Enlightenment. Educated at Glasgow...
William Whewell 1794 – 1866 · English
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, and philosopher and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than two decades. He coined the modern English term scienti...
Isaac Newton 1642 – 1727 · English
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid the foundation ...
Thomas Huxley 1825 – 1895 · English
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist, philosopher of science, and public lecturer, famous in his lifetime as Darwin's bulldog for his vigorous defense of evolutionary th...
Anthony Collins 1676 – 1729 · English
Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, philosopher, and friend and disciple of John Locke in his last years. Independently wealthy and educated at Cambridge, he wrote a ser...
Pierre Gassendi 1592 – 1655 · French
Pierre Gassendi was a French Catholic priest, astronomer, and philosopher and one of the leading anti-Aristotelian voices of seventeenth-century thought. He observed the transit...
Catharine Trotter Cockburn 1679 – 1749 · English
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English moral philosopher, essayist, and dramatist and one of the most accomplished women philosophers of the early eighteenth century. After e...
Damaris Cudworth Masham 1659 – 1708 · English
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, was an English philosopher and one of the most accomplished women thinkers of the late seventeenth century. The daughter of the Cambridge Platonis...
Mary Shepherd 1777 – 1847 · Scottish
Lady Mary Shepherd was a Scottish philosopher and one of the most acute British metaphysicians of the early nineteenth century. The daughter of an Earl, she received an extensiv...
Richard Cumberland 1631 – 1718 · English
Richard Cumberland was an English moral and political philosopher, mathematician, and from 1691 Anglican bishop of Peterborough. His major philosophical work, De Legibus Naturae...
William Wollaston 1659 – 1724 · English
William Wollaston was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and one of the leading early Enlightenment moralists. He spent the last decades of his life as a private scholar i...