Empiricism

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani presents empiricism as the first and most immediate answer to the question "what can I know?": everything that experience, empeiria, teaches me, which he links to the idea of "going around" something12. He sums up its limit in a formula that recurs from one session to the next: we have the real, but not the true. Empiricism puts us in contact with reality but makes us despair of stating the slightest truth about it, because everything flows34. He describes its associationist construction, which goes from sensations to perceptions, then to words, judgments and reasoning5. In it, the subject is a passive mirror, empty until experience makes it fruitful: it abstracts from itself6. When it is consistent, empiricism ends in scepticism, since one cannot pass from the particular to the universal. It should therefore neither speak nor write systems7. He connects it to the Anglo-Saxon field of thought and to d'Alembert. In d'Alembert, "bad empiricism", the weak point of the Enlightenment, confuses matter, truth and reality with the sensible8.

1. 1#1.3 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?14 Sept 2015 · 41:18
2. 2De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026 · 21:49
3. 3#1.5 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Dec 2015 · 9:10
4. 4#2.7 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?1 Aug 2017 · 1:15:49
5. 5#1.3 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?14 Sept 2015 · 49:21
6. 6De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026 · 1:08:32
7. 7Musicosophie 18. Ce qui est musical dans la musique25 Mar 2021 · 1:14:52
8. 8De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026 · 34:11

Summary produced automatically from 13 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.