Empiricisms

In this sweeping volume of comparative philosophy and intellectual history, Barry Allen reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European and world traditions. His work traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. He surveys medical empiricism, Aristotlean and Epicurean empiricism, the empiricism of Gassendi and Locke, logical empiricism, radical empiricism, transcendentalempiricism, and varieties of anti-empiricism from Parmenides to Wilfrid Sellars. Throughout this extensive intellectual history, Allen builds an argument in three parts. A richly detailed account of history's empiricisms in Part One establishes a context in Part Two for reconsidering the work of the radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is "radical" about them is their effort to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began.In Part Three, Allen sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other, slipping over each other instead of intertwining as they did in European history, a difference Allenattributes to a different understanding of the value of knowledge. Allen's book recovers empiricism's neglected, multi-textured contexts, and elucidates the enduring value of experience, to arrive at an idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

For far too long, histories of philosophy have opposed one monolith against another, rationalism versus empiricism . . . lumping together ideas and practices that share nothing more than an appeal to experience and a vague suspicion of speculation... Allen seeks to restore some of these lost riches by surveying the long, variegated history of what it means to think about and with experience... To a degree unusual in the history of philosophy, Allen pays attention to the actual practices of empirical inquiry: the sagacity of clinical observation, the audacity of experiment., Like all good works of historiography this work is driven and informed by a theory; that there is more than one kind of empiricism...Allen's book is thus a work of epistemology as well as intellectual history., rewarding and intellectually nutritious, The role of experience in the empirical sciences can be an important check on empirical truth in the domain of science. At least Allen has not undermined that position. Valuable for history of science as well as philosophy., Allen revisits, deepens, and corrects received wisdom about empiricism's role in twentieth century analytic philosophy. He situates in the broadest possible frame four powerful thinkers whose significance for philosophy and intellectual culture more generally remains profoundly up for grabs: William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze. The book's detailed judicious comparisons of philosophers from traditions that tend to shun one another reminds me of Adrian Moore's splendid Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, and it's no accident that Deleuze is a key figure in both books. Building on his own earlier work on the anthropology of tool use (Knowledge and Civilization), the engineering disciplines (Artifice and Design), and traditional Chinese thought (Vanishing into Things), Allen tells a story with remarkable historical sweep, a diverse cast of characters, and profound appeal to non-philosophical readers.

Barry Allen studied philosophy at the University of Lethbridge and Princeton University, and is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Jerusalem, Shanghai, Istanbul, and Hong Kong, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.