PHIL414/514 SP27
British Empiricism
Dr. Kevin Busch
Monday & Wednesday · 3:30pm–4:45pm · LA5–149
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw fundamental challenges to inherited ways of understanding the world and our place in it. In Britain, philosophers developed ambitious new accounts of reality, knowledge, freedom, and morality, while questioning the methods and assumptions of those before them. Their accounts, so transformative to Early Modern intellectual life, continue to shape contemporary philosophical thought.
This course approaches British Empiricism not thinker by thinker, but through central philosophical questions of the period. How do our thoughts represent things, and what can they represent? What might this imply about the nature of reality, including material objects and minds? What can experience teach us about the world, and what are its limits? Can we be free in a causally determined world? And are moral distinctions discovered by reason or felt through sentiment? We confront these questions through close study of competing answers and the arguments supporting them. Along the way, we put into conversation a wide range of philosophers, including familiar figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, alongside their predecessors, contemporaries, and critics.
