JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704)

BACKGROUND
 John Locke was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the
17th century.
 John Locke is regarded by many as the Founder of Empiricism, an influential
philosophy which states that all knowledge is based on experience derived
from the senses.
 He is often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British
Empiricism, and he made foundational contributions to modern theories of limited,
liberal government.
 He was also influential in the areas of theology, religious toleration, and
educational theory.
 John Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in Wrington, a small village in
southwestern England.
 His father, also named John Locke, was a legal clerk and served with the
Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. His mother was Agnes Keene.
 Locke died on 28 October 1704, and is buried in the churchyard of the village
of High Laver, east of Harlow in Essex, where he had lived in the household of Sir
Francis Masham since 1691.
 Locke never married nor had children.
 Locke is responsible for the theory of "tabula rasa" otherwise known as "blank
sheet," which is what he believed the human brain was upon birth.

EDUCATION
 John Locke was home schooled by his father for the first 14 years. In 1647, at the
age of 15, he was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London.
 In 1652, Locke was elected for a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford and he
joined the college at the age of 20.
 John Locke graduated with a bachelor’s degree in February 1656 and
a master’s degree in June 1658.
 Obtained a bachelor of medicine in February 1675, having studied medicine
extensively during his time at Oxford and worked with such noted scientists and
thinkers as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and Richard Lower.

WORKS
 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)
- Composed jointly by Locke and his mentor Lord Shaftesbury.
- Intended to be used as the Constitution of the English Province of Carolina,
though it was never officially adopted.
 A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
- Originally intended as a personal letter to a friend.
- Locke was a firm believer in the separation of church and state as he felt that
the government should have no say in the business of the soul.
- Were written after the European wars of religion and argued that religious
coercion leads to unrest and belief cannot be enforced by law.
 Two Treatises of Government (1689)
 - Anonymously published by Locke because of the radical notions presented in
these works and a fear of reprisal.
- Contains the idea of the right to revolution which can be clearly traced to
language in the Declaration of Independence.
 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
- Less explicitly political than his earlier works, Locke sets out to demonstrate
that human beings are not born with innate ideas or beliefs, but rather that
they come into the world as a blank sheet.
- Generally seen as a defining work of seventeenth-century empiricist
epistemology and metaphysics.
 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
- Originally intended as friendly advice on child-rearing to a friend, it gives advice
on how to raise and educate children.
- Locke believes that children should not be coddled, and that they should
develop a sound body in addition to a sound mind. He also argues that they
have the same capacity for rationality as adults, and that they should be treated
as such.

ACHIEVEMENTS
 John Locke is widely considered to be one of the greatest English
philosophers and a leading figure in the fields of epistemology,
metaphysics, and political philosophy.
 Made crucial contributions to education, theology, medicine, physics,
economics, and politics.
 Locke’s political philosophy is often noted with shaping both the American
Constitution and the French Revolution and laid the groundwork for liberal
political thought.
 He was the first person to explain the self through a continuity of
consciousness. He proposed that the mind was a blank slate or
tabula rasa.
 His 1695 publication “The Reasonableness of Christianity” is considered
to be his most important theological work in which he argued that
differences of worship could and should be tolerated.

SAYINGS AND BELIEFS

 Locke had an empiricist theory in which we acquire ideas through our
experience of the world.
 Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between different
ideas. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these ideas
in numerous different ways.
 Everyone has a natural right to defend his“Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions”.
 “Education begins the gentleman, but reading, a good company and reflection
must finish him”.
 John Locke stated that the only source of knowledge comes through our senses
 John Locke
The Mind as a "Tabula Rasa"
John Locke’s View on “Self”
 Locke defines the self as "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance,
made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not)
which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or
misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends".
 Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender
infancies have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the
"associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than
those made later because they are the foundation of the self: they are, put
differently, what first mark the tabula rasa.
 John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding restated the
importance of the experience of the senses over speculation and sets out the case
that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate (scraped
tablet or tabula rasa) upon which experience imprints knowledge.
 Locke argued that people acquire knowledge from the information about the
objects in the world that our senses bring. People begin with simple ideas
and then combine them into more complex ones.