ABSTRACT
Many of the writings of Empiricists were critical in tone. The view that all the materials for knowledge are derived from experience was made the basis of criticisms of claims to certain kinds of nonempirical knowledge on the part of the Rationalists. Locke sets down as his purpose ‘to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent’. Berkeley's philosophy results in large part from an attempt to rid Locke's view of inconsistencies—in particular to dispense with notions which are inconsistent with the general empiricist doctrine that all ideas are derived from sense-experience. There are differences of opinion concerning Hume's exact intentions in writing the first book of Treatise of Human Nature, or rather concerning the nature of the philosophical theory that he was there trying to put forward. Some look at his conclusions as entirely sceptical, the result of a development to its extreme of British Empiricism.
