• Hobbes- And he argues in "Of the Origin of Justice and Property" that if mankind were universally benevolent, we would not hold Justice to be a virtue: "’tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin."
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature
• In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge comes via the senses' experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
• epistemology- theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.[1] It addresses the questions:

What is knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? How do we know what we know?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
• theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive""that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the more extreme position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge"