Thanks for downloading the NRTIME podcast. For more details about NRTIME and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, England's greatest contribution to philosophy is probably empiricism. At the end of the 17th century, the philosopher John Locke wrote in his essay concerning human understanding,

all ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be as we say white paper, void of all characters without any ideas.

How comes it to be furnished? When comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?

Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge, to this I answer in one word from experience?

It was a body of ideas that for full tear and for can't after him, defined the English attitude to thought, a straight talking, pragmatic philosophy that was hand in glove with a practical people.

How was the philosophy of empiricism developed in the 17th and 18th centuries? And what effect did this emphasis on experience have on culture and literature in Britain?

With me to discuss English empiricism is Judith Hawley, senior lecturer in English at Royal Holloway University of London, Jonathan Ray, author and philosopher, and Murray Pitock, professor of Scottish and romantic literature at the University of Manchester.

Judith Hawley, John Locke, the defining philosopher for empiricism, but the other two finding fathers of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, can you set the intellectual context of their approach?

Yes, I think I certainly would start with Bacon who in the early 17th century became extremely impatient with the way learning was conducted in the universities and the way that the new sciences were proceeding so slowly.

And he basically set up a kind of research program. He gives us a scientific method and a research program for what we can call the new sciences, natural philosophy, natural history.

And he argues that the way to advance knowledge is to start by collecting sense data, experiences, experiments, I mean the word experience and experiment mean pretty much the same thing in the 17th century.

And he thought that knowledge could be advanced by a group of sensible clever men getting together in ideal colleges and institutions and a massing data.

Now this data wasn't just going to be a collection and heap of sense impressions, I feel hot, I feel cold and so on, but carefully conducted observations of the world.

And then by process of what's called induction, general truths would be arrived at, but all the time these general truths about nature would be anchored to sense impressions, experiments, direct knowledge of the world.

How new was this and how did it fit in with what Newton was doing?

And it's new in the sense that much of what was taught in the universities before the 18th century really was based on Aristotelian and scholastic methods.

Bacon and various other philosophers still respected Aristotel, but they very much disliked the way that natural knowledge was treated in the universities and school systems, which was largely, there are two problems with it.

One is that a stable body of knowledge was being passed on and students were supposed to learn this by road.

There's no advancement in knowledge, nothing new about the world was being discovered.

And the other is that the method of reasoning applied to it was a kind of chop logic, hair splitting, dialectics to arrive at syllogisms and you're not arriving at general truths based on unsupposed sense data.

Now Newton who's often thought of as an empiricist is really a mathematician.

...