A 12th-century desert-island novel helped shape John Locke's blank slate
Ibn Tufail, an Andalusian philosopher, imagined a child growing up alone on an island and reaching adult understanding through experience alone. A Latin translation published in 1671 influenced John Locke's famous picture of the newborn mind as white paper, the founding image of empiricism.
Empiricism holds that genuine knowledge comes only or mainly from the senses. Its defenders argue that pure reasoning is riskier because human thinking is riddled with biases and limits. It stands opposite rationalism, which says reason can yield knowledge independently of the senses, and opposite innatism, which says some ideas are present from birth. The very word goes back to the Greek empeiria, whose Latin counterpart experientia gave English both experience and experiment.
The idea has deep roots across cultures. Between 600 and 200 BCE the Indian Vaisheshika school, founded by Kanada, accepted only perception and inference as reliable, and the Charvaka school trusted perception above everything. In Greece a school of physicians founded in 330 BCE, the Empirics, rejected dogmatic theory in favour of observed appearances. Aristotle, around 350 BC, likened the mind to a writing tablet with nothing yet inscribed, although his account still relied on an active intellect, and he gave the senses more weight than Plato, who pictured souls existing before birth.
Medieval Islamic thinkers developed the blank tablet further, from Al Farabi to Avicenna. Ibn Tufail turned it into fiction in Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and in the 13th century Ibn al-Nafis wrote a rival story in which the island child's mind develops through contact with society instead of isolation. Thomas Aquinas brought the Aristotelian stress on the senses into scholasticism, while Bonaventure argued for the Platonic view.
Renaissance writers pushed harder. Bernardino Telesio built an empirical metaphysics that influenced Giordano Bruno and others, and Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo, used experiment to solve musical tuning problems. Francis Bacon championed the approach in his Novum Organum of 1620. Science now treats knowledge as tentative and probabilistic, with every hypothesis tested against observation rather than intuition or revelation.
Source: Empiricism
