A (Very) Brief Spin with the Big Three
John Locke wore many hats insomuch he was a philosopher, political theorist, and considered by many as the embodiment of bourgeois democratic revolution 1688 in which a constitutional monarch replaced the short-lived Commonwealth.
In the past, Locke studied medicine and Chemistry at Oxford. He came from a Somerset family of the minor gentry who supported the Parliamentary cause in the Civil War. Sometime later after reading Descartes, he became interested in philosophy, yet was opposed to rationalism. He was in his late 50's when his famous "Essay Concerning Human Understanding
" was published.As a philosopher, Locke had a distaste for metaphysics. He wrote to a friend about Leibniz: "You and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling." He disagreed with Plato's theory of universals, and denied any innate ideas "the mind is furnished with ideas and experiences alone."
For example, the mind of a newborn child is like a blank sheet of paper. All ideas are acquired from experience and according to Locke there are two kinds:
(1) Ideas of Sensation - Taste, smell, sound, touch, sight.
(2) Ideas of Reflection, involve the internal operations of the mind - Thinking, believing, willing.
The first ideas are simple ones of sensation, then of reflection, where the mind is essentially passive; later, the mind in an active way forms complex ideas by combining, or companing, or abstracting from simple ideas.
Locke poses the riddle of the blind man which helps in clarifying his theory. It involves a blind man from birth can distinguish a sphere and cube; suddenly given sight, can he tell the sphere from the cube without touching?
For Locke, the relationship between the idea and the object itself is in the qualities; objects have qualities which produce ideas in the mind. Locke said there were primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities "really do exist in the bodies themselves." Secondary qualities produce ideas in the mind which aren't in the object; in this way, Locke was trying to distinguish between appearance and reality.
Locke's theory was initially derived from Newtonian physics, was to prove highly influential. He thought he had explained the origin of all our ideas, and how we come to know the world. But many disagreed with his system.
Among the first to disagree with Locke was an outstandingly lucid thinker by the name of George Berkeley.
