A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Bacon's call for a new science built on observation and induction, the method that opened the way for British empiricism. It includes his famous Idols of the mind, the biases that still cloud our thinking.

Francis Bacon

Locke argues that the mind starts as a blank slate and that every idea comes from experience. The founding text of British empiricism, complete in four books.

John Locke

Berkeley defends his immaterialism as a lively conversation between a skeptic and a believer in matter. The most readable way into his ideas, based on the final 1734 edition.

George Berkeley

How do we see distance if the eye only receives flat images? Berkeley's answer, that we learn it through touch and experience, became a landmark of empiricist psychology.

George Berkeley

Hume's first and most ambitious work, written in his twenties, applies the method of experience to the mind itself. Causation, personal identity and the passions are all put to the test.

David Hume