Abstract

In order to reach beyond the epistemological barrier so solidly put in place by Kant, to reach more deeply into the world of experience, we now need to develop what I call an "inner empiricism"--the empiricism of looking inward and experiencing the inner world. This is the world within the psyche, within the mind and the heart; it is the world of feelings, of direct sensations. And this is the world that yields metaphysical truths. This is the world that Kant overlooked. Prior to Kant, there were philosophers who recognized the importance of this other "instrument". Great metaphysicians, such as Plato or the ninth­century Christian philosopher Duns Scotus, or the great Islamic philosophers-almost all, I believe, based their metaphysical claims about reality on what they discovered from internal experience.