When1: 1670
When2: 1695
Who: John Locke [Locke, John]
What: philosopher
Where: London, England
works\ Letter concerning Toleration [1670]; Two Treatises of Government [1681 and 1690]; Thoughts concerning Education [1686]; Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689: about psychology]; Reasonableness of Christianity [1695]
Detail: He lived 1632 to 1704 and founded empirical psychology and empiricism. William Molyneux helped him and corresponded with him.
Epistemology
Mental objects are sense-data about sensations, memories of sensations or ideas, or concepts {idea}. Sensation is the way objects present to understanding when thinking. Ideas can be simple or complex. People cannot analyze simple ideas or construct them. Mind is passive as it receives simple ideas from appropriate stimuli. Mind cannot prevent or select simple ideas. The two simple-idea sources are sensation and reflection. Sensation ideas result from observing external objects. Reflection ideas result when observing mind's operations. Simple ideas come from sensations or reflections by resemblance, nearness in space and time, and cause and effect {associationism, Locke}.
Idea associations can be false or true. Human action or nature connects true associations. False associations happen by chance or custom.
People construct and analyze complex ideas, such as objects, relations, and forms, from simple ideas using consciousness. Complex ideas combine simple ideas consciously using mathematical and logical operations to rearrange words, abstract, demonstrate, prove, and construct. Words are signs for idea contents, and general ideas are mental structures using words. Complex concepts find common features among objects or events or subtract space and time from objects or events {abstraction from examples}. Mind is active while attending, remembering, discriminating, comparing, combining, enlarging, and abstracting complex ideas.
Knowledge relates ideas perceived by reason. Opinion depends on observation.
Cause and effect is the major idea.
All ideas originate in experience. At birth, mind is blank page {tabula rasa}, waiting for experience to fill. A priori knowledge, such as tautology, does not exist. Because babies and primitive peoples do not know them, there are no innate ideas or universally true or known ideas, even of God or mathematics. Because soul or mind has to later formulate them and judge them, which it does for all ideas anyway, ideas cannot reside in soul for future use. Because people must learn words and grammar first, clear and distinct or intuitively certain ideas cannot be innate. Because the most-profound truths can be so abstract that they are not intuitively certain, they are not innate.
In demonstrative knowledge, necessary formal idea is substance that holds qualities or modes. People can be certain about their ideas and sensations through reflection, but they can know nothing about thing itself, essence, soul, or soul's relation to body. The only possible knowledge is of mind and its contents.
Will a blind person that knows shapes by touch recognize shapes if able to see {Molyneux problem, Locke}?
Understanding cannot perceive itself. Sense organs cannot perceive themselves.
Ethics
God is lawgiver and has rewards and punishments to induce people to conform to law. God's law is also nature's law, so following law leads to good results and breaking it leads to bad results in world.
Public opinion and state are two other law sources, and both have rewards and punishments to induce people to conform to law.
Moral judgments can conform to known ethical laws or not, so moral judgments are demonstrative knowledge.
Metaphysics
Matter is atom groups and has properties. Properties {primary quality, Locke} can be about atoms {corpuscular theory}: mass or solidity, figure, motion, and number. Properties {secondary quality, Locke} can be about atom relations. Tertiary qualities are about object perceptions.
Mind
Mind can sense objects and events {outer sense, Locke} and think about experiencing objects and events {inner sense, Locke}, making two knowledge kinds.
Politics
Kings have no divine right to rule. Hereditary succession to power is not right. Absolute monarchy makes king both judge and accuser.
Primogeniture is unjust.
People have many basic rights. Mothers have rights the same as fathers.
Before government, men follow natural law, which comes from reason and is God's law. All people are equal and free. People judge for themselves and rely on themselves for remedies. There is no anarchy. If all people are prudent, consider their overall interests, not just current ones, and are pious because they fear hell, society needs no law, because general interests of all coincide with special interests of each, over time.
Government results from social contract, to secure life, liberty, and property. States are expressions of people's will. Property causes people to agree on government and give right of judging and enforcing law to authority. Authority must establish laws interpreting natural law, have impartial judges to judge and mete punishment, and have powers to enforce laws.
Judges should be independent of governing authority. The people should elect legislature by majority rule. Legislature and executive should be separate, with equally divided powers to make laws and enforce them. There should be checks and balances among government branches. War or compromise must resolve struggles between branches, because no higher authority can arbitrate.
The state has limited powers against people, especially against their property.
Government is moral trust. If government does not do good things, people can resist it.
There should be religious tolerance, with love of truth. People should avoid dogma.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0224