Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism

Description

The emergence of experimental philosophy was one of the most significant developments in the early modern period. However, it is often overlooked in modern scholarship, despite being associated with leading figures such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, David Hume and Christian Wolff. Ranging from the early Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century to the uptake of experimental philosophy in Paris and Berlin in the eighteenth, this book provides new terms of reference for understanding early modern philosophy and science, and its eventual eclipse in the shadow of post-Kantian notions of empiricism and rationalism. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism is an integrated history of early modern experimental philosophy which challenges the rationalism and empiricism historiography that has dominated Anglophone history of philosophy for more than a century.

Peter R. Anstey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He specialises in early modern philosophy, in particular the philosophy of John Locke, Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon and the French Philosophes. He is the author of the prize-winning book John Locke and Natural Philosophy (2011). Alberto Vanzo is an independent scholar. He has been a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Birmingham and the University of Warwick. His research in early modern philosophy ranges from Kant to experimental philosophy.