Quotes About Empiricists

The beautiful in its pure form can safely be left to the idealists, while the half-beautiful and the ugly occupy empiricists.

It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists which derives from Kant.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

This new philosophical psychology can in this respect be traced back to Maine de Biran, for even if in his time scientific psychology was unaware of its autonomy, and even if Biranian psychology was only critical of that of the empiricists, Biran believed in the Kantian distinction of noumena and phenomena and took care to limit his inquiry to the latter alone, which did not prevent him from extending it in the form of idealist speculations.

Rather than tending to assume that observation was in principle correctible, empiricists ... did not think it was possible (or even desirable) to rectify or perfect perception, because ... For them, all human knowledge is always necessarily circumscribed, conditioned by context, and conceived in terms of relationship