[Encyclios]

Ancient Greece

In Epicurus’ thought, which will later be called “sensism”, developing Democritean themes, he made sensation the fundamental criterion of knowledge: all ideas are the result of sensation, indeed, they are themselves sensations, that is, material configurations of atoms that detach themselves from physical bodies and enter in our body through the channels constituted by the sense organs.

In his “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), Immanuel Kant, in discussing the controversy as to whether pure knowledge of reason derives from experience or if it rather has its source in reason itself, indicated in Aristotle “the head of the empiricists”. However, it is also true that Aristotle’s conception of true science remains tied rather to the Platonic approach based on dialectics, the deductive procedure, and the concept of innate ideas, later taken up again in the modern age by Descartes and the Cambridge Platonists.