Johne Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

John Locke (1632-1704) was a teacher, aide, physician, and a founder of modern European philosophy. His political writings, which we discussed in July, were the cornerstone of the liberal ideology that would eventually come to dominate modern political thought. His reflections on the foundations of metaphysics and epistemology, contained in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, similarly set the agenda for those disciplines for over a century after its publication in 1689. Locke’s immediate predecessors, most notably Rene Descartes, had attempted to found a philosophical science, a system of indubitable knowledge, on the model of geometrical demonstration received from ancient Greece. The most important conclusions about the world—its nature, even its existence—were to be deduced from prior truths. If those prior truths were, as those philosophers had believed, indubitable, the conclusions would follow with certainty. Locke’s attack on innate ideas, for which he is credited as a father of empiricism, is an attack on the authority of the alleged founding truths of metaphysics. If no idea is innate, Descartes’ basic assumptions—e.g., that there are degrees of reality and that the cause must have as much or more being as the effect—can no longer pretend to be the innate and inescapable positions of every intellect. Locke also opens up the field of modern philosophical psychology. The Essay is, among other things, a detailed description of the mental phenomena that words like “thinking,” “idea,” “belief,” “judgment,” and “knowledge” denote. However debatable his conclusions, Locke notices much that modern philosophy had not previously seen as needing comment. Whether interlocutors attacked his positions, like Leibniz, or extended his method beyond its original conclusions, like Berkeley and Hume, or complicated them, like Kant, Locke’s contemporaries and successors were in his debt. We will be reading An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the Hackett abridgment edited by Kenneth Winkler. Note that other editions will contain different selections of text. Please read the Epistle, book I, Book II, Book IV. i-ix, xi-xiv, xx-xxi. (Pages 1-175, 224-274, 284-301, 329-338 in the Hackett edition, which comes out to 256 pages.) Optional secondary readings include the remaining parts of the Essay including chapter III, and two Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles: "John Locke" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ and "Locke's Philosophy of Science" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-philosophy-science/.