Preface

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively, from antiquity down to the global Anthropocene. I discuss the beginnings of empirical philosophy, the trials endured, and the modifications accreted.

Empiricism began in ancient medicine, when a self-consciously “empir­ical” medical philosophy arose in reaction to medical rationalism, itself a product of early interaction between medicine and philosophy. Chapter 1 follows the vicissitudes of the value of experience in antiquity from Democritus and Epicurus, who drew medical empiricism into natural philos­ophy, to Plato and Aristotle, who sought to throttle the birthing empiricism, with also a look at Babylonian empiricism, and empiricism under Islam.

The empiricism of antiquity survived the scientific revolution and be­came a philosophy of modern science owing to an alliance with the new value of experiments, which did not exist (much) in antiquity. An empir­icism genealogically continuous with ancient medicine became entwined with the practice of experiments just when experiments were becoming the leading method of modern natural inquiry. Chapter 2 profiles the rise of ex­perimental natural philosophy, from the European recovery of Aristotle to Galileo and Newton. Chapter 3 continues the story of how empiricism sub­sequently became an epistemology, a psychology, and a theory of meaning.

William James introduced the expression “radical empiricism,” and that was my original starting point. I wanted to explain James's idea and believed it could be easily done. But the further I got into it the more I found, in­cluding his consistency with other thinkers, whom I study collectively as the radical empiricists, these being, besides James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each the subject of a dedicated chapter in Part II.

In Part III I set European empiricisms in conversation with traditional China. I profile the values of experience and experiment, considering tech­nological, scientific, medical, artistic, and alchemical sources, as well as selected texts of Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist thought. We will see them eventually segregate the wide-ranging experiments of their technical culture from the evaluation of experience in their philosophy; neither is exposed to the other or allowed to learn from the other. What lets them slip past each other, instead of entwining as they did in Europe, is a difference between Chinese and European ideas on the value of knowledge.

Philosophers sometimes equate experience with present perception, and consider it an obvious example of knowing. I hope I can change minds here. The experience of empirical philosophy is the experience from which we learn, and that is not merely sensation, perception, or present awareness, but requires memory, living through trials, a history of being changed by expe­rience. To call experience knowledge is like calling a knife a cut. Better to say that experience can be organized and artfully used in inquiries that typically culminate in knowledge.

Empiricism is more multi-t extured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to use his­torical and comparative arguments to elucidate the value of experience, and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism. The values of empiricism that remain relevant and tenable are values of ex- perimentalism, even radical experimentalism, that is, experiments in ex­perimentation. And while experimental values are many, and not limited to laboratory routine, “truth” is not one of these values, which instead favor aes­thetic qualities like interesting, beautiful, surprising, and fecund. The more consistently empiricism appreciates its own experience, the more must the values of empirical knowledge gravitate to the aesthetic, life-affirming, and beautiful, for in that way alone might thought direct what finality it can on the tendency of the future.