Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
No innate ideas: all knowledge comes from experience.
Introduction
Locke says in the preface that the Essay began around 1670 with a discussion among five or six friends that made him ask what our understanding is fit to deal with. Twenty years later it appeared, dated 1690, in four books. Book I attacks the doctrine of innate ideas, Book II derives all ideas from sensation and reflection and distinguishes simple from complex ideas and primary from secondary qualities, Book III deals with words and Book IV with knowledge, probability and faith. The chapter on personal identity was added in the second edition of 1694. The image of the mind as “white paper” comes from Book II.
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Connections
Criticizes
- Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
Taken up in
- Christianity not Mysterious1696 · John Toland
- Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life1705 · Damaris Masham
- Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English)1734 · Voltaire
- A Treatise of Human Nature1739 · David Hume
- Reasons and Persons1984 · Derek Parfit
Criticized in
- New Essays on Human Understanding1704 · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge1710 · George Berkeley
- Sources of the Self1989 · Charles Taylor
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