Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I EMPIRICISM AND NATURALISM § i. Hamilton And Mansel. The empiricism which we have seen in Germany and France concealed with such varying degrees of success and under so many different disguises has in England maintained its genuine form and enjoyed full consciousness of its own true character. Attempts have certainly been made to disguise it; but these have been both rare and unsuccessful, and have never concealed for long the real nature of the underlying thought. England, of course, is the classical land of empiricism, the country of Bacon, Locke and Hume. From Hume a long succession of English empiricists carried on the tradition unchallenged and unopposed; but this very lack of opposition resulted in sterility and stagnation. The empiricist tradition progressed, so to speak, by mere vis inertia, or rather by the sedimentary stratification of new data on the old, of a new evolutionism deposited on the top of the old sensationalism. There is no true development of thought: in Hume the historical function of empiricism is completed and its highest point of originality attained. In the person of this thinker, the greatest ever born on British soil, European philosophy burnt its boats. The hopes of ingenuous dogmatism were finally shattered and no other road remained for thought except that of idealism. Hume's critical analysis of knowledge has a purely negative value; it simply emphasizes in unmistakable terms the necessity for a real solution of the problem. But once this pure negation is stiffened into a rigid and positive system, once the demand is mistaken for a conclusion, the value of empiricism is gone, and nothing remains but one of the many forms of naturalistic dogmatism which base themselves on an intellectual...
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
