John Locke
John Locke was born in Wrington, England to Puritan parents who fostered his education in theology and politics. He attended the Westminster school, and receiving a scholarship, entered Christ Church, Oxford. He studied classical languages, metaphysics, and logic. In 1690, Locke wrote “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, known as one of his greatest works. This essay tries to set limits on human understanding. Locke attempts to answer two questions. The first question is where we get our idea from, and the second being whether we can rely on what our senses tell us. In the essay, he also classifies knowledge into three degrees, the intuitive, demonstrative, and the sensitive. Finally, Locke divides into four categories the ways that ideas can be related. These four categories are identify or diversity, relation, coexistence, and finally real existence.
To understand why Locke wanted to explain where we get our ideas form, it is important to understand what section of philosophy he was a part of. Locke belonged to an eighteenth century group of British philosophers, which included George Berkeley and David Hume. These three philosophers shared a view called empiricism. Empiricism is the belief that all knowledge and idea come from the senses. As Locke explains in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, humans, with their senses, gain all ideas and knowledge by interacting with the external world, and by reflecting their new gained knowledge. By senses, Locke is referring to the five senses: sight, sound, taste, feeling, and hearing. Locke believed that simple sensations of a scenario eventually lead to a complex idea of that same scenario. He though that we could only perceive simple parts of the whole, that would eventually lead up to the entire thing. One aspect of knowledge that Locke was concerned with is what can be called false knowledge. This is knowledge that can not be traced back to simple sensations. The second question that Locke attempts to answer is whether we can rely on what our senses tell us, or is the world what we perceive it to be. To help answer this question he divided sensations into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are described as those that do not change when the substance is divided, including solidity, extension, figure, and mobility. Secondary qualities are those that are subject to change in a substance, such as, colors, sound, and tastes. Thus, all people see primary qualities in the same way, but are able to view secondary qualities in a different way. It is through these qualities that Locke attempted to judge whether we could rely on our senses to perceive the world around us.
