John locke

Introduction

John Locke, the great English proponent of what John Stuart Mill would call "the analytic philosophy of mind," and the "father of English empiricism," was born in 1632 at Wrinton in Somerset. The child of a Puritan attorney, he was educated by Puritans at Westminster and studied numbers and surgery at Christ Church school at Oxford, still a bastion of Royalist sympathies. He held various learned mails there, and became physician and secret consultant to the Whig first earl of Shaftesbury, in whose house he came to reside in 1667. He held a number of authorized places until he was expelled from England in 1684 for supposed complicity in Shaftesbury's contrives. He then travelled in France and took up residence in Holland, where he came to the attention of the then Prince of Orange, who would soon become William III. After William had assumed the throne of England Locke came back into favor, and became commisioner of requests, an advisor on coinage, and a constituent of the assembly of trade.

Discussion and Analysis

To understand why Locke wanted to explain where we get our ideas form, it is important to understand what section of philosophy he was a part of.  Locke belonged to an eighteenth century group of British philosophers, which included George Berkeley and David Hume.  These three philosophers shared a view called empiricism.  Empiricism is the belief that all knowledge and idea come from the senses. As Locke interprets in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, humans, with their senses, gain all ideas and information by interacting with the external world, and by mirroring their new gained knowledge.  By senses, Locke is referring to the five senses: view, sound, flavour, feeling, and hearing. Locke accepted that easy feelings of a scenario finally lead to a convoluted idea of that identical scenario. He though that we could only see simple parts of the entire, that would finally lead up to the entire slimg. One aspect of knowledge that Locke was concerned with is what can be called false knowledge.  This is knowledge that can not be traced back to simple sensations.  The second question that Locke attempts to answer is whether we can rely on what our senses tell us, or is the world what we perceive it to be.  To help answer this question he divided sensations into primary and secondary qualities.  Primary qualities are described as those that do not change when the substance is divided, including solidity, extension, figure, and mobility.  Secondary qualities are those that are subject to change in a substance, such as, colors, sound, and tastes.  Thus, all people see primary qualities in the same way, but are able to view secondary qualities in a different way.  It is through these qualities that Locke attempted to judge whether we could rely on our senses to perceive the world around us.

His two Treatises on Govemment, written in 1679 and 1680, but too fundamental (and too unsafe) to be released then, eventually emerged in 1690, and were ...