British Empiricism

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Aslan10

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Hi everyone,

I am starting to read a little bit of British empirical literature (John Locke, Thomas Paine, & David Hume) and want to pose a few questions on this board.
  1. What would be the Catholic response to empirical philosophy?
  2. Why should we not limit truth to the senses?
  3. How can we know truth outside of our experiences with the senses?
  4. How can we trust truth claims that come from outside the realm of the senses?
I ask because I would like to read some responses to it while I read these enlightenment texts. Thanks.
 
Aquinas said that, concerning our knowledge of the world, nothing exists in the intellect which was not first in the senses (Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.) So you might say he was an empiricist long before Locke.
We should not limit truth to the senses because imagination, intuition, and instinct are vital forces, not only for the acquiring of knowledge, but for our very survival.
We can know truth outside of our experience with the senses by way of logical deduction. The Big Bang Theory was developed upon a purely mathematical model long before experiential evidence came into being to support it.
Any truth claim that comes to us from beyond the realm of the senses may not be empirically verifiable, yet if deduction serves us well, the claim is plausible, and the need to believe the claim is profound, we may trust the claim until it is clearly discredited.

(Paine, by the way, was a theist; so he bought into the truth claim of the existence of God without being able to experience God with the senses.)
 
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