Substance in Modern Empiricism
Subject Areas : Geneology of philosophical schools and Ideasعليرضا جوانمردي اديب 1 , محمد اکوان 2
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Abstract :
The epistemological approach to Empiricism in the Modern era is opposed to the rationalist approach of Descartes and his followers, who believed in the existence of certain innate ideas prior to experience in Man’s mind. The thinkers advocating this approach explored rationalists’ metaphysical problems through denying innate ideas and considering sense experience as the source of knowledge. The results of such investigations had nothing to say, even at their peak, about substance except when trying to deny it. Accordingly, given the process of the development of empiricism by the pioneers of this approach and its consequences, the authors of this paper have tried to deal with the following basic question: After accepting the specific reading of some empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume from the process of attaining knowledge, would it be possible to accept the existence of substance? Here, the writers respond that, based on their studies of the above thinkers’ views of substance, the acceptance of substance is not consistent with empiricism. This is because substance is a meta-empirical entity which sense experience cannot grasp. What follows sense experience in the end is nothing but a collection of impressions which can never explain the existence of substance.
