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Description edit
What started out as an expected one page written project, prompted by a group of the author's friends, the Essay concerning Human Understanding grew into 19 chapters addressing the issues of innate principles, ideas, words, and origins of knowledge. Locke
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Quotes edit
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“Our knowledge in all these enquiries reaches very little farther than our experience.”
This quotation expresses Locke's estimation of the capacity for human knowledge. -
“Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men, as the signs of their ideas.”
This is a concise statement of Locke's theory of meaning. -
“For I imagine anyone would easily grant, that it would be impertinent to suppose, the ideas of colors innate in a creature, to whom God had given sight, and a power to receive them by the eyes from external objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several truths, to the impressions of nature, and innate characters, when we may observe in ourselves faculties, fit to attain as easy and certain knowledge of them, as if they were originally imprinted on the mind.”
This statement neatly sums up Locke's entire purpose in the lengthy Book II, though it is made at the very start of Book I. -
“Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters.”
This is the well-known "tabula rasa" passage. It is probably the most famous statement of the empiricist position. -
“Pound an almond and the clear white color will be altered to a dirty one and the sweet taste into an oily one. What real alteration can the beating of a pestle make in any body, but an alteration of the texture of it?”
This is one of Locke's most famous thought experiments.
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a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places;
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For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind's perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths; which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions.
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For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances.
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If the soul doth think in a sleeping man without being conscious of it, I ask whether, during such thinking, it has any pleasure or pain, or be capable of happiness or misery? I am sure the man is not; no more than the bed or earth he lies on. For to be happy or miserable without being conscious of it, seems to me utterly inconsistent and impossible.
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That which thus hinders the approach of two bodies, when they are moved one towards another, I call solidity.
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men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles.
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If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.
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Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.
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Justice and truth are the common ties of society; and therefore even outlaws and robbers, who break with all the world besides, must keep faith and rules of equity amongst themselves; or else they cannot hold together. But will any one say, that those that live by fraud or rapine have innate principles of truth and justice which they allow and assent to?
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So that the truth of all these moral rules plainly depends upon some other antecedent to them, and from which they must be deduced; which could not be if either they were innate or so much as self-evident.
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First Sentence edit
1. An inquiry into the understanding pleasant and useful.
Glossary edit
- Veil of Perception: "Veil of Perception" is a phrase used to refer to the notion that our perception of the world is indirect, filtered through the medium of our ideas. Locke's doctrine of ideas suggests that he subscribes to the veil of perception, though commentators have argued against this reading.
- Transparency of the Mental: "Transparency of the Mental" is a phrase used to describe Locke's assertion, espoused in Books I and II of theEssay, that nothing can be in the mind without our being aware of it. The assertion is based on Locke's identification of thought with consciousness.
- Substratum: In attempting to come up with a theory of *substance*, Locke reluctantly adopts the notion of a substratum as an unknowable, imperceptible, indescribable basis to which all the qualities of a substance belong. The substratum is what those qualities are "of".
- Substance: According to the *Scholastics* a substance was the most basic unit of existence. Descartes agreed, but he reduced the types of substances in the world from an innumerable mass to only three - God, mind, and Body. Locke grapples with the notion of substance in Book II of the Essay, where he mocks both the Scholastic and Cartesian views, but fails to come to any strong conclusions of his own.
- Sensitive knowledge: The lowest grade of knowledge according to Locke, it does not even count as a wholly legitimate form, but is more akin to pseudo-knowledge. Sensitive knowledge is our knowledge that there is an external world corresponding roughly to our perception of it.
- Secondary Qualities: Secondary Qualities include qualities of color, odor, smell, and taste. According to Locke, there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our ideas of these qualities. What we see as "red", for instance, is really just a colorless arrangement of corpuscles, which, by their particular size, shape, and motion, have the power to produce in us the sensation of redness.
- Scholasticism: The dominant school of thought in Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Age of Enlightenment. Scholastics strictly followed the doctrines of Aristotle.
- Real Essence: According to Locke the real essence of an object is the object's microstructure of corpuscles, which gives rise to the observable properties. Although these microstructures do exist out in the world, real essences do not generate natural kinds the way the *Scholastics* and Descartes thought that essences did. This distinction arises because Locke held that the determination of what part of the microstructure is included in a thing's real essence is based wholly on the man- made *nominal essence*.
- Rationalism (Rationalists): "Rationalism" is a collective name given to several philosophical systems marked by similar strains. Rationalists tend to believe that reason is extremely powerful, and that by using it we can come to know almost everything that there is to know. The most famous Rationalists are Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and G. W. Leibniz.
- Primary qualities: Qualities such as size, shape, and motion. According to Locke these qualities really exist in the external world in a way that roughly corresponds to how we perceive them. See also *Secondary Qualities*.
- Demonstration: Demonstration is the middle grade of knowledge according to Locke, not as good as *Intuition* but still a legitimate form of knowledge. Demonstration is knowledge that proceeds by reasoning out a proof. Each step of the proof in demonstration must be an intuition, so demonstrative knowledge depends upon intuitive knowledge.
- Empiricism: "Empiricism" is a collective name given to a variety of philosophical doctrines concerned with human knowledge. Empiricists generally believe that knowledge comes exclusively through experience and that human beings are born completely without knowledge. In addition to John Locke, some famous empiricists have been George Berkeley, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Rudolph Carnap, G.E. Moore, and W.V. Quine.
- Epistemology: The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, belief, and thought. Epistemological questions include: What is knowledge? How do we form beliefs based on evidence? Can we know anything?
- Essence: An important concept in *Scholastic* philosophy, an essence was supposed to be the quality that made something the type of thing that it was. The essence of man, for example, was believed to be rational thought because it is rational thought that distinguishes man from all other beings. The essence of a knife would be the ability to cut. Descartes tried to demonstrate that there are only two essences in the world--thought, the essence of mind, and extension, the essence of body. Locke attempted to demolish the concept of an essence as anything objectively existing out in the world. Instead, he claimed that it was only human thought that imposed categories on the world, and thus that it was human thought that makes things the types of things that they are. See also *real essence* and *nominal essence*.
- Innate ideas: Innate ideas are ideas that are present in the mind at birth. Plato and Rene Descartes are most famous for holding a theory of innate ideas. Locke's first book of the Essay is an attack on the doctrine of innate ideas.
- Intuition: Intuition is the highest grade of knowledge according to Locke. In intuition, the mind perceives the connections between ideas as soon as the ideas are understood. Examples of intuitive knowledge would be the knowledge that I exist and the knowledge that A=A. Intuitive knowledge is much the same thing as what later philosophers would call analytic truths.
- Metaphysics: The branch of philosophy concerned with asking what there is in the world. Questions about *substance* are metaphysical questions, as are questions about God.
- Mode: According to Descartes, a mode was a way of being a certain substance (e.g. square or red). Locke expands considerably upon this definition. For Locke, a mode is something that depends on substances for its existence, something that cannot exist independently. Properties such as square and red are modes for Locke, but so are numbers, and more abstract concepts such as "gratitude", "beauty", and "hour".
- New Mechanistic Science: Gaining immense popularity in the 17th century, this movement sought to replace the messy and complicated *Scholastic* model of the world with a simpler picture. According to the mechanistic view, all explanation can be given in terms of the principles of matter and motion. Within the mechanistic camp, there were a wide variety of competing theories regarding what those principles should be.
- Nominal Essence: Another name for an *abstract general idea*. A nominal essence is the set of qualities that men have decided to use in order to pick out a particular type. The nominal essence for gold, for instance, might include qualities like yellow, shiny, or malleable. Nominal essences can be relative. A chemist's nominal essence for gold, for instance, might include its atomic number while a layperson's might will not. As a consequence, a piece of metal might count as gold for one person and not for another.
- Ontology: The branch of philosophy concerned with questions of existence. Ontology is a subcategory of *metaphysics*.
- Opinion: According to Locke, most of the facts of science and everyday life are correctly classified under this heading. Opinion differs from knowledge in that it is only probabilistic and not certain.
- Abstract general idea: A abstract general ideas are the pieces of our mental geography that correspond to our general terms, such as "man" and "cat", as opposed to "Socrates" and "Garfield". Our general terms refer to these abstract general ideas rather than to anything in the world. According to Locke, we form abstract general ideas by attending to the similarities between particular ideas and abstracting these out (e.g. the similarities between Felix and Garfield yield our idea of cat). Locke identifies abstract general ideas with what the *Scholastics* and *Cartesians* would call *essence*.
- Argument from Parsimony: In an argument from parsimony, the conclusion rests on the suppressed premise that it is best to posit as few existents in the world as possible. Rather than prove conclusively that something does not exist, an argument from parsimony just shows that any puzzle that might be solved by positing the existence of the thing in question can also be solved (better) without positing the thing's existence. There is no need, therefore, to posit the thing's existence, and so, by the suppressed premise, we should not. Locke's argument against the existence of secondary qualities in the world is an argument of this form.
- Corpuscular Hypothesis: The Corpuscular Hypothesis was a particular formulation of the *new mechanistic science* of the 17th century, propounded by Locke's mentor Robert Boyle. According to this theory, matter is composed entirely of tiny, invisible, indivisible bits, called corpuscles. All events and states in the natural world can be explained with reference to the size, shape, and motion of these corpuscles. Locke believed strongly in this view of reality, and it had a powerful influence on the ideas he expounds in his Essay.
Series & Lists edit
This book is in LMU Anglistik Syllabus. (authoritative list)
This is book 50 of 96 in Wikipedia's 100 most influential books ever written. (authoritative list)
Authors & Contributors edit
- John Locke (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Add the publisher.
Country: England
Publication Date: 1690
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: Add the page count.
Publisher: Add the publisher.
Country: England
Publication Date: 1690
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: Add the page count.
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 121
Subjects edit
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