Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon (Gorak 1991; Searle 1990). In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism (Park 2013) as well as feminist historiography (Shapiro 2016). D. F. Norton (1981), L. Loeb (1981) and many others¹ attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and critical philosophy.² As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has been called the “standard narrative” (Vanzo 2013) and the “epistemological paradigm” (Haakonssen 2004, 2006) only increased. Indeed, at present, a consensus has been reached that the narrative of the antagonism between “Continental rationalism”...