An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689 (dated 1690))
Empiricist account of the origin, extent and limits of human knowledge in four books
Philosophy
John Locke
1632–1704 · English
British empiricism; Enlightenment; liberalism
English philosopher and physician, often called the father of liberalism and the first of the great British empiricists. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding argued that all ideas come from experience, while his Two Treatises of Government grounded legitimate government in consent and the protection of natural rights, deeply influencing the Glorious Revolution and the American founders.
How to spot them
- ▸The mind at birth as "white paper" – the tabula rasa
- ▸Natural rights to life, liberty and estate (property); mixing one's labour
- ▸Primary and secondary qualities; the prince and the cobbler
- ▸Refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha; physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury
Key works
Two Treatises of Government (1689 (dated 1690))
Published anonymously; refutes Filmer's patriarchalism and bases government on consent and natural rights
A Letter Concerning Toleration (Epistola de Tolerantia) (1689)
Argues that the state should not coerce religious belief; written in Latin in Dutch exile
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Influential advice on raising children, stressing habit, virtue and gentle discipline
Key ideas
- No innate ideas: the mind begins like "white paper" and all ideas derive from experience, via sensation and reflection
- Simple ideas are combined by the mind into complex ideas
- Primary qualities (solidity, extension, figure, motion, number) resemble our ideas of them; secondary qualities (colour, taste, sound) are powers to produce ideas in us
- Personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness (memory), not sameness of substance – illustrated by the prince and the cobbler
- In the state of nature people have natural rights to life, liberty and estate; one acquires property by mixing one's labour with what is unowned
- Government rests on the consent of the governed; if it violates its trust, the people may resist and replace it
Quick-fire facts
- •Born at Wrington, Somerset, and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford
- •He trained in medicine and became physician and adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury
- •He fled to the Netherlands in 1683 and returned in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution
- •The First Treatise attacks Sir Robert Filmer's defence of the divine right of kings, Patriarcha
- •"Molyneux's problem" – whether a man born blind and given sight could tell a cube from a sphere by sight – was put to Locke by William Molyneux and discussed in the Essay
- •He helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina
- •He died at Oates in Essex, home of his friend Damaris Masham
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Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — John Locke
- Anthony Kenny — A New History of Western Philosophy