John Locke

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John Locke (26 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was a British philosopher, writer, political activist, medical researcher, Oxford academic, and government official. Locke was a champion of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge was derived from experience. Among his most notable works is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which provides a defense of empiricism and the origins of ideas and understanding. In this work, Locke rejects the idea of innate principles, and argues that all knowledge comes from experience. Locke also wrote on religious toleration and social contract theory. He opposed authoritarianism and argued that individuals should use reason to discover the truth.

Historical Context

Locke was born into an English Puritan family of modest means, but was able to obtain an excellent education by way of his father's connections. 1 In 1647, at the age of fifteen, he began studies at Westminster School, considered London's best. At twenty, he began studies at Christ Church College, Oxford. His studies focused on logic, metaphysics, and languages taught within the framework of Aristotelian scholasticism, for which he developed an intense dislike. 2pp. 3-43 Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) had posited his heliocentric cosmology in 1543, more than a century earlier. Forty years earlier, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) published his observations with the telescope in 1610. These developments had cast Aristotelianism into doubt. 4p. 6 Like many ambitious students of the time, Locke sought alternative resources outside the formal curriculum, which were abundant at Oxford. He became involved with a discussion group organized by John Wilkins (1614-1672)and was exposed to the experimental philosophy and the ideas of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who argued for an inductive methodology for science. The Wilkins group was the nucleus of what would later become the 'Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge', known simply as the Royal Society. England's main society for the promotion of natural philosophy, the Royal Society became a formal institution in the 1660's. The society would set itself in opposition to the Aristotelian scholasticism of the universities, advocating the study of nature rather than of ancient texts. 2p. 4 Locke's notebooks indicate a strong interest in medicine and chemistry. He attended the lectures of the great anatomist Thomas Willis (1621-1675) and took careful notes. 5p. 2176p. 6

After Locke received his bachelor's degree in 1656, he remained at Oxford to study medicine. He worked closely with Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), renown for his pioneering work in the treatment of infectious diseases. 1 Robert Boyle (1627-1691) succeeded John Wilkins as the leader of the scientific group at Oxford, and became Locke's scientific tutor. Boyle ascribed to the corpuscular mechanistic philosophy associated with Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and was noted for his physical experiments. The corpuscular philosophy held that the visible properties of the natural world were due to interactions between invisibly small particles or corpuscles. Locke read Boyle's and Descartes works, as well as those of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), who emphasized the role of the senses in knowledge. He learned from his experimentalist associates and from the writings of Gassendi, to be skeptical of Descartes' rationalism. 217 He accepted Descartes' corpuscular view of matter, his dualistic view that mind and matter were separate substances, and believed the world to contain genuine causal interactions between physical objects. 5

Locke became personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621-1683) (Lord Ashley), a leading English political figure during the 1670's and 1680's. 1 He was an early member of the Royal Society and knew most of the major English natural philosophers, including Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and some continental ones as well. This community was concerned with arguing for the reliability of observation and experiment as a means of acquiring knowledge as opposed to Aristotelian intuition or Cartesian rationalism. 2p. 4 Locke's most important contribution to this argument was his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689. Locke and Newton became directly acquainted while Locke was finishing this work. When Locke read Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, he found epistemological views similar to his own. Both had absorbed the views current in the Royal Society. Locke's essay received its warmest reception from the members of the society, and can be deemed an expression of their collective understanding of scientific methodology. 5

Major Contributions

Locke's Empiricism

In the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke begins by arguing that there are no principles or ideas that are innate in human beings. In seventeenth century England, such principles were widely held to exist and to be necessary to the stability of religion and morality. 2 "Nothing is more commonly taken for granted" he wrote, "than that certain principles both speculative and practical are accepted by all mankind. Some people have argued that because these principles are (they think) universally accepted, they must have been stamped into the souls of men from the outset." 8p. 3 He denies that we hold speculative innate principles, innate ideas of God, identity, or impossibility. If there were such principles, he supposes, they would be known to everyone, even "children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people". 8p. 8 Mathematical truths likewise cannot be innate, as these must be discovered by reason. 2

In the second book, Locke begins his positive account of how people acquire knowledge. "Let us suppose", he writes, "the mind to have no ideas in it, to be like white paper with nothing written on it. How then does it come to be written on?...To this I answer, in one word, from experience". Locke's belief that all knowledge comes from sense experience is empiricism.9p. 18 Unlike Descartes, Locke does not seriously entertain the possibility that his senses are fundamentally unreliable. He writes that, "We certainly find that pleasure or pain follows upon the application to us of certain objects whose existence we perceive (or dream we perceive!) through our senses; and this certainly is as great as we need for practical purposes, which are the only purposes we ought to have". 10p. 202 When our senses are applied to particular perceptible objects, they convey into the mind perceptions of those things. This sensation is the source of most of our ideas. We can also perceive the workings of our own mind within us, which gives us ideas of the mind's own operations such as "perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different things our minds do", a process which Locke calls reflection. 9p. 18 Simple ideas produced by these processes can be grouped into complex ideas, such as those of substances and modes. Substances are independently existing things like God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and constructed things. Modes are dependently existing things like mathematical and moral ideas, which form the content of religion, politics, and culture. Note that while Locke does not believe that we are born with ideas, he believes we are born with faculties to receive and manipulate them. 2

As a corpuscularist, Locke took all observable bodies to be composed of invisibly small material particles called corpuscles and took direct physical contact to be the primary or sole means of communicating motion. Material bodies had certain primary qualities that are impossible to separate from them; size, shape, texture, and motion. They also had secondary qualities, which the object's abilities to produce in people sensations of color, sound, taste, and smell when they interact with their primary qualities. 11 Unlike Descartes, Locke accepted the possibility that the soul might be material. In book IV of his Essay, he wrote that "anyone who will allow himself to think freely...will hardly find reason directing him firmly for or against the soul's materiality". He argued that the materiality of the soul was consistent with "the great ends of religion and morality", since God might effect the material resurrection of the dead on judgment day. 9p. 205

Locke on Scientific Methodology

Like many of his time, Locke sought to replace the Aristotelian scholastic approach to knowledge, which supposed that scientific knowledge was certain knowledge of necessary truths, with conclusions deduced from self-evident premises. Locke realizes that this is too stringent a demand for the new experimental science of the Royal Society. He takes knowledge to be "nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and incompatibility, of any of our ideas". 10p. 19611 Locke distinguishes between nominal essences which are the set of observable qualities we use to classify a thing, and real essences which are the causal grounds of a substance's perceivable qualities. For Locke, true knowledge in natural philosophy would be knowledge of the real essences of material substances and the necessary connections to qualities flowing from them. With such knowledge, we could deduce the tertiary qualities of substances; their powers to produce certain effects in other substances. Just as a locksmith knows that a particular key opens one lock but not another, we could know that opium produces sleep, and hemlock causes death and the reasons why. This however, would require knowledge of the minute corpuscular particles of matter, beyond the range of human senses. Locke believes that their are certain epistemic agents, such as God and the angels, who are capable of such knowledge, but that humans are not.

wledge prevailed prior to Locke’s work stated that scientific knowledge concerned certain knowledge of necessary truths. Locke, upon realization that this demand of scientific knowledge was too strict for the experimental science of his time, developed a new conception that was more appropriate, while retaining the Aristotelian scientific knowledge as an ideal.11p. 4 According to Locke, there are two kinds of scientific knowledge, and they differ in their degree of certainty. Intuition is knowledge understood instantly, and demonstration is knowledge understood after a set of intermediate steps. Both intuition and demonstration are forms of certain knowledge.11p. 8

Locke’s conception of scientific knowledge concerned certain kinds of objects: real essences and the connections that flowed between them. Locke drew a distinction between real and nominal essences. While nominal essences consisted in the observable qualities used to describe and organize a thing, the real essence is what makes the thing what it is.11p. 9 To Locke, people have scientific knowledge of a thing if they know both its real essence and the necessary connections between the real essence and other qualities.11p. 10 This also holds for scientific knowledge in natural philosophy. However, says Locke, accessing either is impossible for people, due to the fact that real essences escape them.

Later, Locke saw that this conception, too, was strict, so he relaxed his condition that knowledge must be absolutely certain, and held that although genuine knowledge was absolutely certain, lack of certainty did not entail ignorance. When knowing truth via intuition or demonstration is not possible, people can still judge it true or false.12p. 15

Locke's Influence

Locke’s Essay posited an argument for rejecting the older, scholastic model of knowledge and science in favor of his empirical one, and it was very successful.2p. 77 Although Locke’s Essay contained much of Cartesian thought, Locke’s work was seen as refutation of Descartes, and moved philosophy toward that.13p. 261

Locke’s arguments against innate ideas was part of his support of the importance of “free and autonomous inquiry”. Locke’s ultimate goal was to show his readers that they could be

"free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience [they] may gain by the innate faculties and powers [they] are born with."13p. 252

Locke’s Essay was also considered the start of British empiricism, which became the preferred mode of philosophy among future Anglophone thinkers such as Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.13p. 261

Criticism

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was heavily criticized. Gottfried Leibniz responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in his rebuttal, New Essays on Human Understanding, where he disagreed with Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. Leibniz writes that there is no way all our ideas could come from experience since there are no real causal interactions between substances. In addition, Locke’s claim that the mind was a blank paper at birth violated Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles.14 Fellow empiricist George Berkeley was also critical of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities—Berkeley claimed that primary qualities as well as secondary qualities were a product of the human mind, and not a part of the object.15

Publications

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References

  1. a b c d  Dunn, John. (2003) Locke: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
  2. a b c d e f g h  Uzgalis, William. (2016) John Locke. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/.
  3. ^  Milton, John R. (1994) Locke's Life and Times. In Chappell (Ed.) (1994), 5-25.
  4. ^  Westfall, Richard. (1980) Never at Rest: A Biography of Issac Newton. Cambridge University Press.
  5. a b c  Rogers, John. (1982) The System of Locke and Newton. In Bechler (1982), 215-238.
  6. ^  Anstey, Peter. (2011) John Locke and Natural Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
  7. ^  Fisher, Saul. (2014) Pierre Gassendi. In Zalta (Ed.) (2016). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/gassendi/.
  8. a b  Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book I: Innate Notions. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book1.pdf.
  9. a b c  Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II: Ideas. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book2.pdf.
  10. a b  Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV: Knowledge. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book4.pdf.
  11. a b c d e f  Kochiras, Hylarie. (2014) Locke's Philosophy of Science. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-philosophy-science/.
  12. ^  Osler, Margaret. (1970) John Locke and the Changing Ideal of Scientific Knowledge. Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1), 3-16.
  13. a b c Chappell (1994) 
  14. ^  Cook, Brandon. (2013) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/.
  15. ^  Berkeley, George. (1957) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Forgotten Books.