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  Locke and the Problem of Epistemology The Essay is chiefly concerned with issues in what would today be called epistemology (or the theory of knowledge), metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. As its title implies, its purpose is to discover, from an examination of the workings of the human mind, just what we are capable of knowing and understanding about the universe we live in. Locke's answer is that all the materials of our understanding come from our ideas - both of sensation and of reflection (that is, of outward' and 'inward' experience respectively) - which are worked upon by our powers of reason to produce such 'real' knowledge as we can hope to attain. The structure of the Essay and its place in Locke's work LOCKE'S LIFE AND WORK 5 Beyond that, we have other sources of belief--for instance, in testimony and in revelation—which may afford us probability and hence warrant our assent, but do not enlitle us to certai

  John Locke and the political issues During the central decades of the 17th century. Britain was also convulsed by a parallel but more general dispute about who possessed ultimate political authority. Was it the monarch? Or was it Parliament? Or was authority somehow divided among different political bodies? Taxation was often the heated focus of this dispute. Who had the right to levy taxes, the monarch or Parliament? Most of the parties to these disputes shared the premise that whoever has political authority has absolute, unlimited political authority. Once we know who has the right to rule, we know who has the right to rule without constraint. A common argument was that monarchial authority must be unlimited because a monarch with limits on his or her authority would not be a true sovereign. However, the premise that political authority must be unlimited in its scope came under attack as theorists developed or refined the idea that political authority exists only for certain lim

  Lesson 1 John Locke: Knowledge, Politics and Civil Government   Summary While starting with the study of modern British Philosophy, John Locke is a key entry to begin with. John Locke not only contributed to the theoretical debates around the nature of reason, the epistemic foundations of Modern Science and their far reached consequences upon culture, but he also contributed to hugely modify the structure of political institutions in modern Britain. Taking into account the omnipresence of his enlightening ideas along the literary progress of western modern thought, many components of his contribution will be exposed in the following comment: First of all, John Locke had contributed to the paradigmatic turn taken by the new generation of both scientists and philosophers against the legacy of scholasticism in line with Descartes issues; the nature and foundations of our knowledge. Locke was hostile towards his doctrine of eternal and innate ideas , the former was not innovati

  V. FIFTH MEDITATION : The essence of material things, and the existence of God considered a second time  A. The ideas of corporeal things are not chimerical  Thesis: Whereas the act of thinking of corporeal things is subject to my will (I can attend to them or not as I please), certain of the content s of our thought of them (i.e. their nature, essence ) are not: “they are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures."  Proof: The ability to demonstrate mathematically that certain determinations hold of necessity with reference to general ideas of spatial extension, e.g. the properties of a triangle, proves that I cannot have invented these ideas. For if these ideas were my inventions, it would be in my power to add or subtract determinations from them at will, e.g., I could, at a whim, change things so that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals three right angles instead of two. However, once mathematical methods enable me to perceive clearly and di