Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is

derived from one's sense-based experience. This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which
states that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses.
Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience. It emphasizes the role of
experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and argues that the only
knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on experience). Most empiricists also discount the
notion of innate ideas or innatism (the idea that the mind is born with ideas or knowledge and is not a "blank
slate" at birth).

In the 17th and 18th Century, the members of the British Empiricism school John Locke, George
Berkeley and David Hume were the primary exponents of Empiricism. They vigorously defended
Empiricism against the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.
The doctrine of Empiricism was first explicitly formulated by the British philosopher John
Locke in the late 17th Century. Locke argued in his "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding"
of 1690 that the mind is a tabula rasa on which experiences leave their marks, and therefore denied
that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable without reference to experience. However,
he also held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through
intuition and reasoning alone.
he Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, concerned that Locke's view opened a door that
could lead to eventual Atheism, put forth in his "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge" of 1710 a different, very extreme form of Empiricism in which things only exist either as
a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving.
He argued that the continued existence of things results from the perception of God, regardless of
whether there are humans around or not, and any order humans may see in nature is effectively just the
handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to Empiricism would later come to be called Subjective
Idealism.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume brought to the Empiricist viewpoint an extreme Skepticism.
He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided into two categories: relations of ideas (e.g.
propositions involving some contingent observation of the world, such as "the sun rises in the East")
and matters of fact (e.g. mathematical and logical propositions), and that ideas are derived from our
"impressions" or sensations. In the face of this, he argued that even the most basic beliefs about the
natural world, or even in the existence of the self, cannot be conclusively established by reason, but
we accept them anyway because of their basis in instinct and custom.

John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an English philosopher of the Age of

Reason and early Age of Enlightenment. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of
Epistemology and Political Philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential early
Enlightenment thinkers.

He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived from experience, and the knowledge of
which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and certainty.
His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the
self". He also postulated, contrary to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that the mind was a "tabula
rasa" (or "blank slate") and that people are born without innate ideas.
Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1753) was an Irish philosopher of the Age
of Enlightenment, best known for his theory of Immaterialism, a type of Idealism (he is sometimes considered
the father of modern Idealism). Along with John Locke and David Hume, he is also a major figure in the British
Empiricism movement, although his Empiricism is of a much more radical kind, arising from his mantra "to be is
to be perceived".
David Hume (1711 - 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist and
historian of the Age of Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and, along
with John Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the influential British
Empiricism movement.
He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided into two categories: relations of ideas (e.g.
mathematical and logical propositions) and matters of fact (e.g. propositions involving some contingent
observation of the world, such as "the sun rises in the East"), and that ideas are derived from our "impressions"
or sensations. In the face of this, he argued, in sharp contradistinction to the French Rationalists, that even the
most basic beliefs about the natural world, or even in the existence of the self, cannot be conclusively
established by reason, but we accept them anyway because of their basis in instinct and custom, a hard-line
Empiricist attitude verging on complete Skepticism.