Education

For someone looking for an introduction to empiricism (for the non-trained, nonprofessional philosopher) doing a search on Amazon.com (for example) can prove quite daunting. There are thousands of books on empiricism. Does anyone have particular recommendations for an introduction to empiricism, especially the history/development of empiricism and how it stands opposed to rationalism? Thanks very much!

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The best way to learn about those movements may be to jump in and read some primary texts, for example Descartes' Meditations and Hume's Enquiry. There are good paperback editions of these works, and decent e-texts available from the "Early Modern Texts" site. As long as you read these texts with some patience and care, you'll be able to understand key elements of both traditions and can come to your own conclusions about their similarities and differences.

If you are looking for an historical commentary, Anthony Kenny's A Brief History of Western Philosophy is one of the most engaging and readable one-volume histories of philosophy.

Those historical perspectives will provide you with enough insight to understand recent work in empiricism. You will need to select texts carefully, however, because much work on contemporary empiricism is pretty technical and not as engaging or readable as the classic historical texts. Quine's famous article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a good place to start, although you would have to work through that text slowly to understand Quine's main theses. There are plenty of commentaries on contemporary empiricism, although I'll leave it to my fellow panelists to recommend specific titles.

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