John Locke
Enlightenment Philosopher
John Locke
Life
John Locke was born on August 29 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, England. He entered Westminster School in London in 1647, earned a position as a King's Scholar, and six years later in 1652 he enrolled in Oxford Christ Church.
After graduating from Oxford Christ Church in 1656, he would go on to complete a Master of Arts at the college before become a resident tutor. In the following years his relationship with Earl of Shaftsbury, his economic and political clout grew.
By 1671 he was a major investor in the Royal African Company which was at the time one of the biggest slave traders of Europe. However, in 1683 Locke fled from England to avoid being implicated in the Rye House Plot, a failed plot to kill King Charles II and his brother James.
As a founding member of the Whig party he is often credited for much of its growth when he returned to England, following the exile of Charles II.
Works
His most significant work is certainly his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. In four books the work lays the foundation for future empiricist and enlightenment thought.
Other notable works are his Two Treaties of Government in1689, A Letter Concerning Toleration in the same year, and Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693.
Death
Locke succumbed to a chronic sickness on October 28 1704 and died in Essex.
John Locke Reflection Gorgias
Significant Quotes
“Since it must be confessed, that in their discovery, there is no use made of reasoning at all, and I think those who give this answer, will not be forward to affirm that the knowledge of the maxim, that it is impossible for the same thing to be or not to be as a deduction of our reason, for this would be to destroy the bounty of nature they seem so found of, wise to make knowledge of these principles to depend on the labor of our thoughts, for all reasoning is a search and casting about, and it requires pains in application, and how can it with any tolerable sense be supposed that what was imprinted by nature as the foundation and guide of our reason, should need the use of reason to discover its limit. ”
“To conclude this argument of universal consent, I agree with these defenders of innate principles, that if they are innate, they must needs have universal assent. For that a truth should be innate, and yet not assented to, is to me as unintelligible, as for a man to know a truth, and be ignorant of it, at the same time. But then, by these men’s own confession, they cannot be innate; since they are not assented to by those who understand [29] not the terms, nor by a great part of those who do understand them, but have yet never heard nor thought of those propositions; which, I think, is at least one half of mankind. But were the number far less, it would be enough to destroy universal assent, and thereby show these propositions not to be innate, if children alone were ignorant of them.”
“Whereby it is evident, if there be any innate truths in the mind, they must necessarily be the first of any thought on; the first that appear there.
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“And if these first principles of knowledge and science are found not to be innate, no other speculative maxims can (I suppose) with better right pretend to be so.
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