It was marked by continued conflicts between King and Parliament and debates over religious toleration for Protestant dissenters and Catholics.
Locke was born in Wrington to Puritan parents of modest means. His father was a country lawyer who served in a cavalry company on the Puritan side in the early stages of the English Civil War. In Locke went to Westminster School in London.
From Westminster school he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of at the age of twenty. As Westminster school was the most important English school, so Christ Church was the most important Oxford college. Education at Oxford was medieval. Locke, like Hobbes before him, found the Aristotelian philosophy he was taught at Oxford of little use.
There was, however, more at Oxford than Aristotle. The new experimental philosophy had arrived. The group around Wilkins was the nucleus of what was to become the English Royal Society. The Society grew out of informal meetings and discussion groups and moved to London after the Restoration and became a formal institution in the s with charters from Charles II.
The program was to study nature rather than books. Locke received his B. His career at Oxford, however, continued beyond his undergraduate days. The rank was equivalent to a Fellow at any of the other colleges, but was not permanent. Locke had yet to determine what his career was to be.
At this point, Locke needed to make a decision. The statutes of Christ Church laid it down that fifty five of the senior studentships should be reserved for men in orders or reading for orders.
Only five could be held by others, two in medicine, two in law and one in moral philosophy. Thus, there was good reason for Locke to become a clergyman. Locke decided to become a doctor. The new leader of the Oxford scientific group was Robert Boyle. Boyle was, however, most influential as a theorist. He was a mechanical philosopher who treated the world as reducible to matter in motion. Locke read Boyle before he read Descartes.
When he did read Descartes, he saw the great French philosopher as providing a viable alternative to the sterile Aristotelianism he had been taught at Oxford.
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge ….
Locke knew all of these men and their work. Sydenham was an English physician and Locke did medical research with him. He writes:. Presumably this will reveal the degree of certainty of the knowledge based on such ideas. David Thomas was his friend and collaborator. Locke and Thomas had a laboratory in Oxford which was very likely, in effect, a pharmacy.
In Lord Ashley, one of the richest men in England, came to Oxford in order to drink some medicinal waters there. He had asked Dr. Thomas to provide them. Thomas had to be out of town and asked Locke to see that the water was delivered.
As a result of this encounter, Ashley invited Locke to come to London as his personal physician. Living with him Locke found himself at the very heart of English politics in the s and s. Lord Ashley was one of the advocates of the view that England would prosper through trade and that colonies could play an important role in promoting trade. Ashley persuaded Charles II to create a Board of Trade and Plantations to collect information about trade and colonies, and Locke became its secretary.
In his capacity as the secretary of the Board of Trade Locke was the collection point for information from around the globe about trade and colonies for the English government. In his capacity as the secretary to the Lords Proprietors, Locke was involved in the writing of the fundamental constitution of the Carolinas. There was a monetary crisis in England involving the value of money, and the clipping of coins.
Locke wrote papers for Lord Ashley on economic matters, including the coinage crisis. While living in London at Exeter House, Locke continued to be involved in philosophical discussions. He tells us that:. Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee, that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.
This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse; which having been thus begun by chance, was continued by intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.
Epistle to the Reader, N: 7. He recalls the discussion being about the principles of morality and revealed religion Cranston —1. Thus the Oxford scholar and medical researcher came to begin the work which was to occupy him off and on over the next twenty years. In after Shaftesbury had left the government, Locke went back to Oxford, where he acquired the degree Bachelor of medicine, and a license to practice medicine, and then went to France Cranston The Edict of Nantes promulgated by Henry IV in was in force, and so there was a degree of religious toleration in France.
Louis XIV was to revoke the edict in and French Protestants were then killed while some , went into exile. In Shaftesbury was imprisoned in the tower. His imprisonment lasted for a year. In , after the mysterious murder of a London judge, informers most notably Titus Oates started coming forward to reveal a supposed Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the King and put his brother on the throne. This whipped up public anti-Catholic frenzy.
Though Shaftesbury had not fabricated the conspiracy story, nor did he prompt Oates to come forward, he did exploit the situation to the advantage of his party. In the public chaos surrounding the sensational revelations, Shaftesbury organized an extensive party network, exercised great control over elections, and built up a large parliamentary majority.
As the panic over the Popish plot receded, Shaftesbury was left without a following or a cause. Shaftesbury was seized on July 21, and again put in the tower. He was tried on trumped-up charges of treason but acquitted by a London grand jury filled with his supporters in November. At this point some of the Country Party leaders began plotting an armed insurrection which, had it come off, would have begun with the assassination of Charles and his brother on their way back to London from the races at Newmarket.
The chances of such a rising occurring were not as good as the plotters supposed. Memories of the turmoil of the civil war were still relatively fresh. Eventually Shaftesbury, who was moving from safe house to safe house, gave up and fled to Holland in November He died there in January Locke stayed in England until the Rye House Plot named after the house from which the plotters were to fire upon the King and his brother was discovered in June of Locke left for the West country to put his affairs in order the very week the plot was revealed to the government and by September he was in exile in Holland.
He also wrote and published his Epistola de Tolerentia in Latin. The English government was much concerned with this group. They tried to get a number of them, including Locke, extradited to England.
In the meanwhile, the English intelligence service infiltrated the rebel group in Holland and effectively thwarted their efforts—at least for a while. The revolt was crushed, Monmouth captured and executed Ashcraft Ultimately, however, the rebels were successful.
This became known as the Glorious Revolution of It is a watershed in English history. For it marks the point at which the balance of power in the English government passed from the King to the Parliament.
Locke returned to England in on board the royal yacht, accompanying Princess Mary on her voyage to join her husband. It is worth noting that the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration were published anonymously. Locke had met Damaris Cudworth in and became involved intellectually and romantically with her. She was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, and a philosopher in her own right. During the remaining years of his life Locke oversaw four more editions of the Essay and engaged in controversies over the Essay most notably in a series of published letters with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester.
In a similar way, Locke defended the Letter Concerning Toleration against a series of attacks. Nor was Locke finished with public affairs.
In the Board of Trade was revived. Locke played an important part in its revival and served as the most influential member on it until The new Board of Trade had administrative powers and was, in fact, concerned with a wide range of issues, from the Irish wool trade and the suppression of piracy, to the treatment of the poor in England and the governance of the colonies.
During these last eight years of his life, Locke was asthmatic, and he suffered so much from it that he could only bear the smoke of London during the four warmer months of the year. Locke plainly engaged in the activities of the Board out of a strong sense of patriotic duty. After his retirement from the Board of Trade in , Locke remained in retirement at Oates until his death on Sunday 28 October Locke is often classified as the first of the great English empiricists ignoring the claims of Bacon and Hobbes.
Locke explains his project in several places. Perhaps the most important of his goals is to determine the limits of human understanding.
Locke writes:. For I thought that the first Step towards satisfying the several Enquiries, the Mind of Man was apt to run into, was, to take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted.
Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge.
Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz. So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience.
Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these—sensation—tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other—reflection—tells us about the operations of our own minds.
Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both. Locke has an atomic or perhaps more accurately a corpuscular theory of ideas. Ideas are either simple or complex. We cannot create simple ideas, we can only get them from experience.
In this respect the mind is passive. Once the mind has a store of simple ideas, it can combine them into complex ideas of a variety of kinds. In this respect the mind is active. Thus, Locke subscribes to a version of the empiricist axiom that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses—where the senses are broadened to include reflection.
Book III deals with the nature of language, its connections with ideas and its role in knowledge. Book IV, the culmination of the previous reflections, explains the nature and limits of knowledge, probability, and the relation of reason and faith.
Let us now consider the Essay in some detail. The role of Book I of the Essay is to make the case that being innate is not a way in which the understanding is furnished with principles and ideas. Locke treats innateness as an empirical hypothesis and argues that there is no good evidence to support it. In pursuing this enquiry, Locke rejects the claim that there are speculative innate principles I.
Locke rejects arguments from universal assent and attacks dispositional accounts of innate principles. Why should children and idiots be aware of and able to articulate such propositions? Locke says:. It seems to me a near Contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the Soul, which it perceives or understands not; imprinting if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making certain Truths to be perceived. Locke then proceeds to attack dispositional accounts that say, roughly, that innate propositions are capable of being perceived under certain circumstances.
Until these circumstances come about the propositions remain unperceived in the mind. With the advent of these conditions, the propositions are then perceived. Locke gives the following argument against innate propositions being dispositional:.
For if any one [proposition] may [be in the mind but not be known]; then, by the same Reason, all Propositions that are true, and the Mind is ever capable of assenting to, may be said to be in the Mind, and to be imprinted: since if any one can be said to be in the Mind, which it never yet knew, it must be only because it is capable of knowing it; and so the Mind is of all Truths it ever shall know.
Thus, even if some criterion is proposed, it will turn out not to do the work it is supposed to do. When Locke turns from speculative principles to the question of whether there are innate practical moral principles, many of the arguments against innate speculative principles continue to apply, but there are some additional considerations. Thus, one can clearly and sensibly ask reasons for why one should hold the Golden Rule true or obey it I. There are substantial differences between people over the content of practical principles.
Thus, they are even less likely candidates to be innate propositions or to meet the criterion of universal assent. In the fourth chapter of Book I, Locke raises similar points about the ideas which compose both speculative and practical principles.
The point is that if the ideas that are constitutive of the principles are not innate, this gives us even more reason to hold that the principles are not innate. He examines the ideas of identity, impossibility and God to make these points. In Book I Locke says little about who holds the doctrine of innate principles that he is attacking. For this reason he has sometimes been accused of attacking straw men. John Yolton has persuasively argued Yolton that the view that innate ideas and principles were necessary for the stability of religion, morality and natural law was widespread in England in the seventeenth century, and that in attacking both the naive and the dispositional account of innate ideas and innate principles, Locke is attacking positions which were widely held and continued to be held after the publication of the Essay.
But there are also some important connections with particular philosophers and schools that are worth noting and some points about innate ideas and inquiry. Locke rather clearly has in mind the Aristotelians and scholastics at the universities. It is an expression of his view of the importance of free and autonomous inquiry in the search for truth. Ultimately, Locke holds, this is the best road to knowledge and happiness.
Locke, like Descartes, is tearing down the foundations of the old Aristotelian scholastic house of knowledge. But while Descartes focused on the empiricism at the foundation of the structure, Locke is focusing on the claims that innate ideas provide its first principles. The attack on innate ideas is thus the first step in the demolition of the scholastic model of science and knowledge.
Ironically, it is also clear from II. In Book II of the Essay , Locke gives his positive account of how we acquire the materials of knowledge. Locke distinguishes a variety of different kinds of ideas in Book II. Locke holds that the mind is a tabula rasa or blank sheet until experience in the form of sensation and reflection provide the basic materials—simple ideas—out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed.
While the mind may be a blank slate in regard to content, it is plain that Locke thinks we are born with a variety of faculties to receive and abilities to manipulate or process the content once we acquire it. Thus, for example, the mind can engage in three different types of action in putting simple ideas together.
The first of these kinds of action is to combine them into complex ideas. Complex ideas are of two kinds, ideas of substances and ideas of modes. Substances are independent existences. Beings that count as substances include God, angels, humans, animals, plants and a variety of constructed things. Modes are dependent existences. These include mathematical and moral ideas, and all the conventional language of religion, politics and culture. The second action which the mind performs is the bringing of two ideas, whether simple or complex, by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them.
This gives us our ideas of relations II. The third act of the mind is the production of our general ideas by abstraction from particulars, leaving out the particular circumstances of time and place, which would limit the application of an idea to a particular individual. In addition to these abilities, there are such faculties as memory which allow for the storing of ideas.
Having set forth the general machinery of how simple and complex ideas of substances, modes, relations and so forth are derived from sensation and reflection, Locke also explains how a variety of particular kinds of ideas, such as the ideas of solidity, number, space, time, power, identity, and moral relations arise from sensation and reflection.
Several of these are of particular interest. Locke also made a number of interesting claims in the philosophy of mind. He suggested, for example, that for all we know, God could as easily add the powers of perception and thought to matter organized in the right way as he could add those powers to an immaterial substance which would then be joined to matter organized in the right way.
His account of personal identity in II. Locke offers an account of physical objects based in the mechanical philosophy and the corpuscular hypothesis.
The adherents of the mechanical philosophy held that all material phenomena can be explained by matter in motion and the impact of one body on another.
They viewed matter as passive. Some corpuscularians held that corpuscles could be further divided and that the universe was full of matter with no void space. Atomists, on the other hand, held that the particles were indivisible and that the material world is composed of atoms and the void or empty space in which the atoms move. Locke was an atomist. Atoms have properties. They are extended, they are solid, they have a particular shape and they are in motion or rest.
They combine together to produce the familiar stuff and physical objects, the gold and the wood, the horses and violets, the tables and chairs of our world.
These familiar things also have properties. They are extended, solid, have a particular shape and are in motion and at rest. In addition to these properties that they share with the atoms that compose them, they have other properties such as colors, smells, tastes that they get by standing in relation to perceivers. The distinction between these two kinds of properties goes back to the Greek atomists. This distinction is made by both of the main branches of the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
Both the Cartesian plenum theorists, who held that the world was full of infinitely divisible matter and that there was no void space, and the atomists such as Gassendi, who held that there were indivisible atoms and void space in which the atoms move, made the distinction between these two classes of properties. For instance, to form the idea of "cat" I would take my ideas of Frisky, Snowball, Felix, and Garfield and abstract out the tail, the furriness, the size, the shape, the meow etc.
I would take all of these similar observable properties and forge them into a new idea, the idea of "cat. If an animal fits my idea, then it is a cat.
If it does not, then it is not. This method of individuating sorts makes categories entirely conventional rather than natural. Locke believes that there are no natural kinds in the external world. Instead, there is a continuum of nature, and we impose boundaries among chunks of this continuum for our own purposes.
Locke calls the essence that is responsible for sorting individuals into classes the nominal essence. The nominal essence, again, is just the abstract general idea, which is just a collection of observable properties. In addition to the nominal essence, objects also have a real essence.
The real essence of a thing is based in its internal constitution. The real essence is that part of the internal constitution that gives rise to the observable qualities that make up the nominal essence.
Though a real essence has a basis in the world, rather than just in our minds, Locke argues that it cannot be used to sort things into natural kinds. This is so because, first of all, we cannot observe the internal constitution of things.
In addition, even if we could observe the internal constitution of things say, with a powerful microscope real essences still could not help us sort things into classes. The real essence is itself determined by the nominal essence. Internal constitutions give rise to a myriad of observable properties. It is only the parts of the internal constitution that gives rise to those properties included in the nominal essence that become a part of the real essence.
What counts as the real essence, then, is based entirely on how we carve up nominal essences. The entire Essay builds up to Locke's theory of knowledge.
The upshot of this theory is that knowledge is possible but limited. He is arguing here primarily against the rationalists, who believed that our capacity to know is virtually limitless, and the skeptics, who believed that we are incapable of knowing anything at all. Locke gives a strict definition of knowledge, whereby one can only be said to know something when one sees why it is necessarily so.
That is, knowledge depends on the perception of a necessary connection. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
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Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading For he that sees a candle burning, and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger in it will little doubt that this is something existing without him which does him harm and puts him to great pain: which is assurance enough when no man requires greater certainty to govern his actions by that what is as certain as his actions themselves.
A skeptic, for example, may deny that the glass furnace exists, but if she sticks her hand into the furnace she will irresistibly act on the deliverances of her senses.
She will move her hand away from where she perceives the furnace to be, betraying that she in fact accepts what her senses tell her about the world. For the purposes of guiding her action, then, even the skeptic takes the deliverances of her senses to be real. How strong this serves as a rejoinder to the skeptic is not immediately clear. Or, perhaps more strongly, the skeptic may reply that though they are compelled to assent to what the senses convey, such assent is not rational or reasonable.
It is more like a reflex than an action. Jennifer Nagel has argued that Locke anticipates this kind of response from the skeptic. Locke, according to Nagel, argues that all it is to treat something as really existing is to treat it as action guiding. Locke, in other words, might be taken to collapse the distinction between real existence and real for practical purposes of guiding our action with respect to pleasure and pain.
Insofar as our senses provide a guide to securing pleasures and avoiding pains, the senses fulfill their purposes and achieve all the knowledge we can reasonably hope for. A skeptic, then, who hopes for more knowledge over and above guidance with respect to pleasure and pain simply demands too much. That is all there is to knowledge of real existence. Ultimately, a reply to skepticism based on collapsing real existence with action guidance is only as strong as that collapse.
Any form of skepticism that takes knowledge of real existence to be more than knowledge of how to pursue pleasure and avoid pain will remain unmoved. When Locke mentions skeptical worries he tends to dismiss them as unworthy of—or possibly as themselves ruling out—serious response. Here are two examples:. If anyone say a dream may do the same thing and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects he may please to dream that I make him this answer, 1.
For I think nobody can, in earnest, be so skeptical, as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels. At least, he that can doubt so far, whatever he may have with his own Thoughts will never have any controversy with me; since he can never be sure I say anything contrary to his opinion. Locke seems to suggest in these passages that the skeptic is in some way self-undermining. In raising the possibilities they do, they somehow undermine the ability to even coherently talk about knowledge of the external world.
Keith Allen has recently developed an argument that connects the account of sensitive knowledge as a perception of agreement between ideas, discussed in section 2. Section 2. According to this approach, all of our ideas are stamped with an idea of reflection that tells us which of our mental faculties was responsible for producing the idea in our minds at that time. When we have a sensory experience of some object, like the crimson water fountain in section one, our idea of that object agrees with the idea of actual sensation, which itself agrees with the idea of real existence.
As Locke understands the kinds of skeptical doubts in the above mentioned passages, skepticism amounts to doubting the veracity of our ideas of reflection. That is, radical skepticism amounts to doubting that when an idea of a crimson water fountain is stamped with the idea of actual sensation, the idea of the crimson water fountain really is received through sensation.
Instead, the idea might be produced in the mind by the mind itself recalling or imagining the idea unbeknownst to itself. Ideas of reflection provide us with our only way of understanding our mind, however. We have no access to our minds or their activities other than through ideas of reflection.
To doubt the veracity of an idea of reflection is therefore to doubt the very possibility of even talking about activities of the mind like knowledge. In doubting whether our ideas of reflection really do tell us about the activities of the mind, then, the skeptic renders useless all talk of knowledge whatsoever. In raising the doubts that they do, however, the skeptic undermines their ability to talk about knowledge at all.
Without being able to talk about knowledge the skeptic renders the very doubts they raise about knowledge empty and meaningless. The force of this response depends on the strength of the skepticism confronted. This reply is only addressed at the most radical of skeptics—the kind of skeptic who challenges that the reflective idea of sensation tells us anything at all about the means by which an idea was produced in the mind.
Such a skeptic doubts even the connection between a mind and its thought. A less radical skeptic may simply suggest that on any given particular occasion in which you think you have sensitive knowledge, you do not. A moderate skeptic of this kind would simply note that the reflective idea of sensation is not infallible, it is at best reliable.
There are occasions, then, when an idea of a sensible object is stamped with a reflective idea of sensation but the idea of the sensible object is not in fact produced in the mind via sensation. This more moderate worry does not threaten to completely undermine our ability to understand our own minds via ideas of reflection but it does seem to undermine any given instance of sensitive knowledge.
There need be no difference in terms of the ideas in your mind when you look up the hall and see a crimson water fountain and when you hallucinate one. Thus, though we cannot be generally mistaken about the existence of the external world we can be mistaken in any particular case. Indeed, in no case is skepticism refuted, or proved wrong.
Rather, the skeptic is pushed back with arguments that support a probable opinion that skepticism is mistaken. The force of this response, however, rests on claims about the fundamental nature and purpose of our cognitive faculties that seem beyond the scope of knowledge. Finally, the claim that the radical skeptic is self-undermining likewise divorces the having of sensitive knowledge from anti-skeptical argument.
Even the radical skeptic, on this argument, is not so much refuted through a reductio ad absurdum argument as she is set aside as incoherent or not worth serious engagement.
The skeptic Locke engages in the pages of the Essay is one who suggests that what seem to be sensory experiences are in fact nothing but the product of our own mind as a kind of dreaming or mere imaginations. So, even if Locke succeeds in rebuffing the worry that the mind itself is responsible for its sensory experiences, it is not clear how far that takes him against other nearby worries. To appreciate this issue and the fine line Locke attempts to draw, consider three claims that Locke holds.
First, we cannot know the fundamental nature of any kind of thing, even the nature of our own minds. Second, we know the existence of things distinct from our minds.
Third, we know the existence of physical objects bodies through sensation. On a Cartesian view, not only do we know the existence of an external world but we also know its fundamental nature. Locke accepts, nevertheless, that we know bodies to exist distinct form our own minds as thinking things.
Satisfactorily addressing this question for Locke takes us beyond the scope of this entry and into untangling the relationships between what Locke calls nominal essences, real essences, and substance. Locke thinks of knowledge of the external world as sensitive knowledge of real existence.
That is, it is knowledge that some object exists distinct from our mind and affects our mind by producing certain ideas in it. This knowledge is achieved through sensory experience. It is neither the result of reflecting on ideas already in our mind nor of deductively reasoning from some premises. It is empirical knowledge gained through experience.
Locke nevertheless insists that we have sensitive knowledge. Indeed, Locke does not seem to think that the skeptic can be fully defeated or demonstratively proved wrong. Our passivity in sensation and the coherence of our sensation seem to call out for explanation. The best explanation, Locke seems to think even though he does not explicitly argue the point, is the existence of an external world. Locke rejects other forms of skepticism as either grounded on unacceptable assumptions or else as containing the seeds of their own incoherence.
But in this failure, Locke is surely not alone, even among other canonical figures in the history of philosophy. Several entries above are from this edition—Volume 85, Issue 3. What year? In addition to the entries listed above, there is an introduction to the volume and commentary on each article from Vere Chappell.
Matthew Priselac Email: mdpriselac ou. Locke: Knowledge of the External World The problem of how we can know the existence and nature of the world external to our mind is one of the oldest and most difficult in philosophy. The Content of Sensitive Knowledge For now we will simply suppose that you did have some knowledge of the external world to share with your friend.
How We Come to have Sensitive Knowledge Locke gives a somewhat unusual name to knowledge of the external world. The Limitations of Sensitive Knowledge So far, then, we have seen both the what and the how of knowledge of the external world according to Locke. Locke writes: Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.
It is worth considering the complete passage: Now the two ideas that in this case are perceived to agree and do thereby produce knowledge are the idea of actual sensation which is an action whereof I have a clear and distinct idea and the idea of actual existence of something without me that causes that sensation. Sensitive Knowledge as Assurance rather than Strict Knowledge Sam Rickless has recently advanced what he calls the assurance view of sensitive knowledge.
Analyzing Knowledge rather than Defining its Subject Matter Another approach of note developed during the late twentieth century in the work of Ruth Mattern and then David Soles. Sensitive Knowledge and Skepticism about the External World Section 1 explored what Locke takes knowledge of the external world to be, its content and the means by which it is achieved.
Skepticism and Practical Doubt In addition to emphasizing the special connection between sensory experience, on the one hand, and pleasure and pain, on the other, Locke repeatedly remarks that skepticism can be cured by fire. Locke writes: For he that sees a candle burning, and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger in it will little doubt that this is something existing without him which does him harm and puts him to great pain: which is assurance enough when no man requires greater certainty to govern his actions by that what is as certain as his actions themselves.
Here are two examples: If anyone say a dream may do the same thing and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects he may please to dream that I make him this answer, 1. References and Further Reading a. Primary Texts Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed. Peter Nidditch.
Oxford University Press, This is the standard scholarly edition of the Essay. It includes an editorial system to note revisions made to the Essay from the first through sixth editions of the Essay as well as references to the translation of the Essay into French by Pierre Coste. Locke, John. The Works of John Locke ed. Thomas Tegg , Secondary Literature Entries are organized by topic, including the context of their mention in this entry.
Vere Chappell, p. Cambridge University Press, Woolhouse spends time in the entry developing the distinct incompatibility between sensitive knowledge and the definition of knowledge.
Jolley, Nicholas. Locke: Epistemology and Ontology. Bolton, Martha. Ott, Walter. Nagel, Jennifer. Newman, Lex. Lex Newman, It concludes with a shorter more easily digested presentation of the view of sensitive knowledge developed in the paper above.
Locke and Direct Perception Yolton, John. Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding. Lennon, Thomas. The article from the Cambridge Companion is the most accessible of the bunch and takes on some of the most straightforward objections to the theory. Sensitive Knowledge as Assurance Rickless, Samuel.
Rickless, Samuel. Rickless provides both textual and philosophical motivation for his interpretation. The second, forthcoming article addresses some of the criticisms that have been made of his view by Allen, Nagel, and Owen.
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