Concepts in British Empiricism

This chapter traces a debate among British empiricists in the early modern period about our capacity to form abstract ideas. Locke holds that our ability to form abstract ideas explains our capacity for general thought and our linguistic understanding. However, Berkeley and Hume insist that abstract ideas are impossible and are left to try to explain these capacities in other ways. Roughly fifty years after Hume’s death, Mary Shepherd attempted to prove the existence of an external world in a way that revived this dispute, claiming that our ability to have abstract ideas is much more fundamental to our knowledge of the world and ourselves than even Locke recognized.