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""Understanding Empiricism"" is an introduction to empiricism and the empiricist tradition in philosophy. The book presents empiricism as a philosophical outlook that unites several philosophers and discusses the most important philosophical issues bearing on the subject, while maintaining enough distance from, say, the intricacies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume scholarship to allow students to gain a clear overview of empiricism without being lost in the details of the exegetical disputes surrounding particular philosophers. Written for students the book can serve both as an introduction to current

Cartesian Empiricisms considers the role Cartesians played in the acceptance of experiment in natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. It aims to correct a partial image of Cartesian philosophers as paradigmatic system builders who failed to meet challenges posed by the new science's innovative methods. Studies in this volume argue that far from being strangers to experiment, many Cartesians used and integrated it into their natural philosophies. Chapter 1 reviews the historiographies of early modern philosophy, science, and Cartesianism and their recent critiques. The first part of the volume explores various Cartesian contexts of experiment: the impact of French condemnations of Cartesian philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century; the relation between Cartesian natural philosophy and the Parisian academies of the 1660s; the complex interplay between Cartesianism and Newtonianism in the Dutch Republic; the Cartesian influence on medical teaching at the University of Duisburg; and the challenges chemistry posed to the Cartesian theory of matter. The second part of the volume examines the work of particular Cartesians, such as Henricus Regius, Robert Desgabets, Jacques Rohault, Burchard de Volder, Antoine Le Grand, and Balthasar Bekker. Together these studies counter scientific revolution narratives that take rationalism and empiricism to be two mutually exclusive epistemological and methodological paradigms. The volume is thus a helpful instrument for anyone interested both in the histories of early modern philosophy and science, as well as for scholars interested in new evaluations of the historiographical tools that framed our traditional narratives

This is the first volume of original commissioned papers on the subject of Newton and empiricism. The chapters, contributed by a leading team of both established and younger international scholars, explore the nature and extent of Newton's relationship to a variety of empiricisms and empiricists.

Cover -- Original Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Foreword -- PART I Critical Common-sensism -- 1. Terminology -- 2. Cognition -- Material Quality of Cognition -- Theory of Signs -- 3. Every Cognition is Judicative -- 4. Different Senses of 'Determine' -- 5. Peirce's Thesis -- Further on the Usage of 'Intuition' -- 6. Associational not the Same as Causal Determination -- 7. Why Intuitive Cognitions need not be Assumed -- 8. No Necessity of Assuming a 'First' Cognition -- 9. Peirce's Use of 'Self' -- 10. 'Percepts' and 'Perceptual Judgments' -- 11. Generality and Vagueness -- 12. Why Intuitive Cognition is not Possible -- 13. Abduction and Induction -- 14. The Abductive and Inductive Character of Thought -- 15. Peirce and the Scottish School -- 16. Three Categories of the Mind -- 'Immediate Perception' -- 17. The 'Indubitable' Propositions -- 18. The Theory of Doubt and Belief -- 19. The Meaning of 'Indubitable' -- 20. The Social and Perceptual Indubitables -- 21. 'Theoretical' and 'Practical' Beliefs -- 22. Doubt, Belief and Empirical Science -- 23. The Meaning of 'Truth' and of 'Reality' -- 24. The Principle of Fallibilism -- 25. Peirce and the 'Cartesian Tradition' -- 26. The Meaning of 'Common Sense' and of 'Experience' -- 27. Peirce and Contemporary Logical Empiricism -- PART II Pragmatism -- 28. Origin of Pragmatism -- 29. The Purpose of Pragmatism -- 30. What is an Interpretant? -- 31. Peirce's Limitation of Pragmatism -- on Purely Demonstrative Signs -- 32. General and Special Analyses of Meaning -- 33. The Pragmatic Criterion of Meaning -- 34. The Criterion with Respect to Sentences -- 35. Pragmatism and Positivism -- 36. Peirce's Realism -- 37. On Hypotheses -- 38. The Element of Conventionalism in Peirce -- 39. 'Purified Philosophy' -- 40. The Second Kind of Utterance on Pragmatism

Editorial -- Contents -- Part I: Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism -- Ernst Mach and Pragmatism - The Case of Mach's Popular Scientific Lectures (1895) -- William James and the Vienna Circle -- The "Pragmatic Oil" -- James, Mach, and others -- Wilhelm Jerusalem: The Viennese Supporter of James' Pragmatism -- James, Vienna, and Philosophy of Science -- A Sequel to the Story -- References -- Classical Pragmatism and Metaphysics: James and Peirce on Scientific Determinism -- Introduction -- Contextualization: Scientific Determinism in the Late Nineteenth Century. A French Anti-deterministic Tradition -- William James on Scientific Determinism -- Charles S. Peirce on Scientific Determinism -- Closing Remarks: Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Science -- References -- Beyond Realism and Antirealism? The Strange Case of Dewey's Instrumentalism -- Reichenbach: Dewyan Instrumentalism from a Positivist Point of View -- Alternate Readings of Dewyan Instrumentalism -- Naturalist Empiricism -- Beyond Realism and Antirealism? -- Instrumentalism: Realism or Antirealism? -- Instrumentalism: Method or Theory? -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Dewey's Works -- Essays -- Further Sources -- American Pragmatism, Central-European Pragmatism and the First Vienna Circle -- Introduction -- The First Vienna Circle and American Pragmatism -- The Endorsement of Pragmatism in Schlick's Vienna Circle -- The Problematic Nature of Some Pragmatist Anti-aprioricisms -- Central European Pragmatism -- The First Vienna Circle, Viennese Empiricism and Pragmatism -- Conclusion -- References -- On Rational Restraints of Ontology -- The Armchair Problem -- Rational Restraints and Ontological Context -- Trust in Sense Experience and Scientific Experiments -- Organization of Sensations by Means of Concepts -- Logical or Argumentative Rationality -- Conclusions

Abstract
In 1832 Harriet Martineau began writing a series of fictional tales intended to illustrate the principles of political economy. By 1834 monthly sales numbers for the series were prolific and Martineau was gaining an international reputation. The Illustrations of Political Economy has long been read as advancing a simplistic popular Ricardianism that spoke powerfully to its immediate audience but became obsolete within just a few decades. This article complicates these assumptions by showing how the tales take a Malthusian stance on questions regarding the proper scope and method of economic science and hence anticipate the inductivist and historicist critiques of Ricardian economics that Malthus inspired. The process by which she conducted research for the tales and the process by which her characters learn economic lessons resemble the inductive process that the Cambridge inductivists and later the English historical economists posited as an alternative to the abstract and deductive method they associated with Ricardo. These tales also reveal how cultural, religious, and historical forces influence economic life and economic decision-making, suggesting that, as the inductive and historical economists often argued, understanding these forces was essential to arriving at a true understanding of political economy.