Abstract

Contemporary political theory gives little attention to empiricism, associating it with positivism and remaining content with its textbook definition: a theory of knowledge as it is gained through the senses. By interrogating the political and aesthetic thought of Edmund Burke in relation to David Hume's theory of human nature and Gilles Deleuze's rendering of transcendental empiricism, this dissertation uncovers an alternative tradition of empiricism that gives rise to a distinctively immanent and historicist conception of politics and political theory. As a specifically political philosophy, transcendental empiricism shifts focus away from knowledge and truth toward practice and belief, prompting an appreciation of the political salience of the whole of experience, not just the rational, but also the affective and practical dimensions. This work contributes to recent scholarship that seeks to complicate the exclusive understandings of a number of binaries central to the tradition of political theory: theory and practice, nature and culture, reason and passion, custom and freedom. Transcendental empiricism's recognition of the inescapably social and historicist nature of experience marks only the cognitive and practical starting point for politics. Beyond the knowledge that we are always already in medias res and imbricated in culture is the practical fact of pluralism and the beginning of politics