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Locke vs. Hume: Who Is the Better Concept-Empiricist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Ruth Weintraub
Ruth Weintraub
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Abstract

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is not because of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , Summer 2007 , pp. 481 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2007

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