“Ah, so it has come to that.”
“Yes, imagine!”
“And what did he say?”
“I’ll give you three guesses.”
“I imagine he said something along the lines of Happy Birthday!”
“Bingo.”
Alberto let Sophie in. He was dressed in yet another costume. It wasn’t all that
different from last time, but today there were hardly any braidings, bows, or lace.
“But that’s not all,” Sophie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you find the note in the mailbox?”
“Oh, that. I threw it away at once.”
“I don’t care if he laughs every time he thinks of Berkeley. But what is so funny
about that particular philosopher?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“But today is the day you’re going to talk about him, isn’t it?”
“Yes, today is the day.”
Alberto made himself comfortable on the sofa. Then he said:
“Last time we sat here I told you about Descartes and Spinoza. We agreed that
they had one important thing in common, namely, that they were both rationalists.”
“And a rationalist is someone who believes strongly in the importance of
reason.”
“That’s right, a rationalist believes in reason as the primary source of
knowledge, and he may also believe that man has certain innate ideas that exist in the
mind prior to all experience. And the clearer such ideas may be, the more certain it is
that they correspond to reality. You recall how Descartes had a clear and distinct idea
of a ‘perfect entity,’ on the basis of which he concluded that God exists.”
“I am not especially forgetful.”
“Rationalist thinking of this kind was typical for philosophy of the seventeenth
century. It was also firmly rooted in the Middle Ages, and we remember it from Plato
and Socrates too. But in the eighteenth century it was the object of an ever increasing
in-depth criticism. A number of philosophers held that we have absolutely nothing in
the mind that we have not experienced through the senses. A view such as this is
called empiricism.”
“And you are going to talk about them today, these empiricists?”
“I’m going to attempt to, yes. The most important empiricists—or philosophers
of experience—were Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and all three were British. The
leading rationalists in the seventeenth century were Descartes, who was French;
Spinoza, who was Dutch; and Leibniz, who was German. So we usually make a
distinction between British empiricism and Continental rationalism.”
“What a lot of difficult words! Could you repeat the meaning of empiricism?”
“An empiricist will derive all knowledge of the world from what the senses tell
us. The classic formulation of an empirical approach came from Aristotle. He said:
‘There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses.’ This view implied a
pointed criticism of Plato, who had held that man brought with him a set of innate
‘ideas’ from the world of ideas. Locke repeats Aristotle’s words, and when Locke
uses them, they are aimed at Descartes.”
“There is nothing in the mind... except what was first in the senses?”
“We have no innate ideas or conceptions about the world we are brought into
before we have seen it. If we do have a conception or an idea that cannot be related to