ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses Berkeley’s claim that Locke’s physical realism leads to skepticism and has to be replaced by a radically new metaphysics, idealism or what he labelled immaterialism. It examines Sellars’s rejection of the given and defended the reliabilist theory of perceptual knowledge against his view that the only defensible alternative to the given is a coherence theory of justification. The book explains Locke’s theory that mathematical and logical principles are a priori but not about real existence and the more radical theories of Mill, Peirce and Quine that the idea of the a priori is itself a mistake. It also explains the main skeptical challenges facing empiricism: the problem of justifying beliefs about eternal reality and the basic sources of evidence, that is, perception, memory and induction.
