British Empiricism

British empiricism designates the canonical trio of early modern philosophers — John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume — whose work established experience as the foundation of all substantive knowledge. The label is retrospective and geographical rather than doctrinal: these three were not a school with a shared program, but successive radicalizations of a single epistemological impulse. Locke's moderate empiricism made the mind a tabula rasa; Berkeley pushed it toward idealism; Hume carried it to the skeptical conclusion that causation itself is a habit of mind, not a feature of the world. The movement's historical significance lies not in its answers but in its questions: it forced philosophy to confront the limits of what experience can justify, and thereby prepared the ground for Kant's critical philosophy and every subsequent philosophy of science that takes empiricism seriously.