1. Powerpoint Highlights
Empiricism

2. All knowledge comes from experience (sense-perception)
empeiros
Tabula rasa: blank slate
All knowledge comes from experience (sense-perception)
The Empirical Approach

3. Perception
“What can give us surer knowledge than our senses? With what else can we distinguish the true from the false?”---Lucretius

4. Three Anchor Points of Empiricism
(1) The only source of genuine knowledge is sense experience
(2) Reason is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge unless it is grounded in the Solid Bedrock of Sense Experience
(3) There is no evidence of innate ideas within the mind that are known apart from experience.

5. The Empiricism of John Locke
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? .... To this I answer in one word, from experience.
The great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation

6. Locke’s primary and secondary qualities

7. George Berkeley "Esse est percipi" (To Be is to Be Perceived)

8. Berkeley’s view of reality

9. All that you believe to be true…
Is merely your perception…
Reality lies in your perception of your experience
Matter does not exist apart from its perception: idealism

10. If knowledge lies in experience of perception, what implications does this have for:
Choose a subject:
The Red/Blue divide in public opinion research
Violent Video games’ effect on Propensity to Commit Violent Acts

11. David Hume
All that we learn is from experience Perceptions and Ideas that arise from The Problem of Induction; we assume that the future will be like the past.. Our understanding of cause and effect is based on experience Hume is ultimately a skeptic.

12. Can we know ourselves….
We only experience a stream of consciousness---of perceptions— regarding who we are..
We can never truly know ourselves….
Hume’s denial of self-knowledge….

13. All knowledge comes from experience…Perplexing Problems
The Existence of God
Infinity
Moral goodness