“One of the great historic controversies in philosophy,” according to Bertrand Russell, is that between empiricists–“best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume”–and rationalists. This book sets the empiricists in their contemporary and cultural context, examines their various approaches to philosophy, and highlights the significance of their ideas to 20th-century thinking. By focusing on what the “empiricists” actually have to say, rather than on their classification as such, Woolhouse incidentally shows how unreliable these conventional labels can be.