← All schools🔬 17th – 18th century

Empiricism

The mind is born a blank slate and all knowledge arrives through experience — moving philosophy’s foundation from innate ideas to sensory evidence.

Locke declared the mind a tabula rasa, all ideas arriving through experience — epistemology, but also political gunpowder: if no one is born carrying truth, no one is born entitled to rule. Hume drove the same principle to the end and blew up the foundation itself: causation is habitual association, the "self" a bundle of perceptions. Empiricism thus walked to the edge of self-demolition — and that very thoroughness startled Kant awake from his dogmatic slumber.

Who belongs to it

📄Locke1632–1704English Philosopher, Founder of Empiricism and Liberal Political Philosophy 🌊Hume1711–1776Scottish Philosopher, the Great Synthesizer of Empiricist Skepticism

Whom it opposed — and who opposed it

📐 RationalismThe century-long standoff with rationalism that forced Kant’s third road