Comrades:

John Locke

It's not as if John and I are exactly bosom buddies. He argues for the existence of God; I deny it (or at least reject all the major arguments that have been proposed for God's existence). He says that it is probable that the sun will rise tomorrow, while I hold that we have no basis for that belief. He says there is a self; I claim there isn't. While Locke claims that private property is a natural right, I do not.

Okay, I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Maybe I should say this guy is actually my rival? No—there is one thing that we definitely agree on, and it's a biggie: empiricism. John claimed—and he was the first to do so—that all knowledge is ultimately based on experience, on observation and experiment. In this I agree with him 100%. Since my whole philosophical view is based on that assumption, I have to count Locke as a friend.

But I reserve the right to change my mind and drop him from my list of Facebook buddies... you know, to un-Locke myself from my association with him. (I saw you laugh at that.)

George Berkeley

I feel pretty much the same about Berkeley as I feel about Locke. So, yes, we disagree about philosophical proofs regarding God's existence, but that's not too surprising, since I have this disagreement with almost everyone. Besides, Berkeley was a bishop—what would you expect him to say? He claims that only minds and ideas in the mind exist. Needless to say I think that's pretty silly. But the important thing is he was an empiricist—and that is enough to qualify him as a brother in my book.

Adam Smith

Adam counts as a friend because he really is a friend. I don't mean just an intellectual ally; I mean an actual, flesh-and-blood, go-out-to-dinner-together type buddy. It doesn't hurt that he's a fellow Scotsman.

The great thing is, we're totally in the same ballpark intellectually. Or, as I would prefer to express it, Adam has wisely chosen to follow in my footsteps. Sure, he's credited with being the founder of classical economics, but the foundations of this whole approach lies in the pioneering economic work of yours truly. And then there's his work in ethics (yes, Adam Smith did more than just write The Wealth of Nations), with its emphasis on the notion of sympathy—he builds on my writings there, too.

Francis Hutcheson

Francis is an acquaintance of mine and a fellow Scotsman, so he has that going for him. But on top of that, he has a very good moral theory that puts the feelings of approval and disapproval at the heart of morality. (While Lord Shaftesbury has a similar theory that, like mine, extends to aesthetics, I'm going with Frances and the Scottish connection here.)

Now, it's true that Francis claims that God is responsible for instilling those moral feelings in us. I replace that unfortunate bit of baseless speculation with the far more plausible hypothesis that these feelings are due to Nature. There, fixed it for him.

Rivals:

René Descartes

My psychic friends tell me that in the 21st century, criticizing Descartes's views will be all the rage. Well, I assure you that this was not the case during my time. Descartes, with his rationalist views, was the man, especially when I first began writing.

Everyone just swoons over this guy—it's slightly embarrassing, actually. He gains this immortal reputation for saying what exactly? That God's existence, the true nature of the physical world, and the true nature of the self can all be established by the use of pure reason alone. He also claims that we can know such things with nothing less than absolute certainty.

I don't know if it's the water in France, or if the guy just ate a little too much escargot, but this kind of thinking is just silly.

Thankfully, I came along to show that it is experience, not reason, that is the basis of all genuine knowledge—and that nearly everything Descartes claimed isn't even knowable, much less certain.

Samuel Clarke

You would be hard pressed to find someone with whom I agree less than I do with this fine gentleman. In fact, if you put a negative sign in front of Clarke's wildly rationalistic theories, that would be a good way of beginning to see what I believe.

But it's Clarke's moral theory that particularly irks me. He holds that ethical truths are discoverable through the use of reason; as a moral sense theorist, I reject this idiocy. To be fair, Clarke is not the only one to hold such a belief: Hobbes is inclined toward this view, and even Locke—yes, my empiricist so-called friend—sometimes leans in this direction, too.

Theologians

Okay, that sounds pretty harsh. It's not that I reject everything that theologians say; I just reject most of what they tend to say about religion. In particular, I do not accept their claim that morality and aesthetics are grounded somehow in the divine. Plus, I am not at all fond of the arguments they have put forward as proof of God's existence—the kind of thing we find in the writings of George Cheyne and Colin Maclaurin, for example.

But, hey, at least I put my money where my mouth is—I dedicate a whole book to refuting these theologians' arguments. Unfortunately, people had to wait until after I was dead to read it; it was just too controversial for me to release while I was alive.