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A seminal Enlightenment text by French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac originally published in 1746, here presented in English translation and critical edition by Hans Aarsleff. Condillac offers a groundbreaking empiricist account of human knowledge, arguing that cognition arises from sensory experience and that language and signs are foundational to mental life—a view that sharply challenged innate-ideas theories and influenced later philosophers such as Rousseau and Herder. The work traces the development of the mind’s operations and includes detailed discussions of perception, memory, abstraction, and the origin and progress of language

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245: $a: Essay On the Origin of Human Knowledge
245: $b:
082: $a:
100: $a: Étienne Bonnot de Condillac & Hans Aarsleff (editor & translator)
650: $a: Philosophy
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250: $b: Cambridge University Press
250: $c: 2001
020: $a: 9780521584678
300: $a: 225