PSYC 3140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Empiricism, Renaissance Humanism
9 May 2018
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PSYC 3140
Lecture 17
1. British Empiricists and French Sensationalist philosophers
a. Empiricism Philosophy which asserts that knowledge arises from
experience. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and
evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas.
All knowledge comes from experience.
i. Denies the notion of innate ideas
ii. These philosophers attempted to explain the functioning of
the mind as Newton had explained the functioning of the
universe. That is, they sought a few principles, or laws, that
could account for all human cognitive experience.
b. Empiricists’ analysis of moral behavior emphasized hedonism.
c. Influenced by Newton – strongly opposed rationalism of
Descartes, especially his beliefs in innate ideas and an
autonomous mind.
i. Descartes’s dualistic conception of humans meant that our
bodies act according to mechanical principles (our bodies
are machines) but our minds do not.
ii. Without the autonomous mind that Descartes had
postulated, however, humans were equated with nonhuman
animals, and both could be understood as machines.
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