Top 35 Quotes About Empiricism
#1. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James
#2. Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
George Santayana
#3. Empiricism teaches that there is a real world of fixed things on the outside and that ideas of these outside things are stamped on the mind which is at the beginning of life a blank.
Holly Estil Cunningham
#4. In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction.
John Quiggin
#5. Relaxed Empiricism
I only believe something to be true if someone I know quite well tells me if happened.
Bill Bailey
#6. Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.
David Bentley Hart
#7. Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
Oliver Sacks
#8. Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.
Jonah Goldberg
#9. Mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism ... they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
Alan Watts
#10. Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
E. O. Wilson
#11. In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#12. Entwined with the strand of conservatism in the Democratic party is the strand of empiricism.
Dean Acheson
#13. There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.
Criss Jami
#14. Real science exists, then, only from the moment when a phenomenon is accurately defined as to its nature and rigorously determined in relation to its material conditions, that is, when its law is known. Before that, we have only groping and empiricism.
Claude Bernard
#15. When Friedrich Nietzsche mocked Immanuel Kant for having "discovered a moral faculty in man", he inadvertently resolved Kant's dilemma of being unable to identify what exactly constituted his "moral law" for fear of offending against a charge of empiricism from the likes of David Hume.
Joseph B.H. McMillan
#17. Medicine is not a science; it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.
Emmet Densmore
#18. I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.
Hugh Laurie
#19. The beauty of agile comes in with its incremental nature and use of empiricism to focus on three "I"s - Interaction, Iteration, and Improvement.
Pearl Zhu
#20. The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
#21. Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#22. The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
David Foster Wallace
#23. There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
David Whyte
#24. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
Sun Tzu
#26. All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Immanuel Kant
#27. The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#28. The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
William James
#29. If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
Denis Diderot
#30. The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.
Tom Heehler
#31. Scientific knowledge does not contain within itself directions for its humanitarian use.
Thomas Szasz
#32. It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.
Ernst Cassirer
#33. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.
William James
#34. If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.
Raheel Farooq
#35. Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.
Franz Grillparzer
