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Empiricism

The position that all knowledge ultimately derives from sense experience — held by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, among others.

For empiricism the mind at birth is a blank slate (“tabula rasa”); all knowledge is derived directly or indirectly from inner and outer experience, and general laws are won inductively from observations. The classic elaborations came from John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume.

Hume pushed the position to its limit — and thereby, by Kant's own account, roused him from his “dogmatic slumber”. Kant's answer dissolves the rigid opposition of empiricism and rationalism: all knowledge begins with experience, but it does not all arise from it — space, time and the categories are contributed a priori by the subject.

Where it appears

Source: Wikipedia: Empiricism