Justin Fox(#12) Installment number 2

John Locke(1632-1704)

Locke was born in 1632 in a small village in England called Wrington. As a teenager he studied at westminster school in London. He later attended the University of Oxford. He studied many things logic, metaphysics, language and medicine. While at Oxford he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He acquired a job at Oxford where he went on to develop his Essays On the Law of Nature. He went on to become the personal physician of the family of lord Ashley(later the earl of Shaftesbury), with whom locke was personally acquainted.

Because of Ashley, Locke bounced between different government positions. This is when he began writing Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke then traveled France, upon returning he found that Ashley had fallen out of favor. This was when he composed Two Treatises concerning Government, one of his biggest accomplishments. His Two Treatises concerning Government was where he introduced his ideas of natural rights of man and the social contract. He then fled to the Netherlands to escape persecution. He began work on an Essay Concerning Toleration, which was influenced by his own experiences with governments in England, France and the Netherlands.  

In his later years he began to focus on theology and published The Reasonableness of Christianity, which argued for an eclectic form of Christianity. Locke later became a key member of the Board of Trade, which oversaw new territories in north america. Locke’s health was fragile for most of his adult years and the London air was hard on his lungs. In 1704 his health began to deteriorate and he died, in Essex where he had been residing for the last decade. Some of his ideas that are still around today are separation of church and state, religious freedom and liberty. He influenced a wide variety of scholars and philosophers, ranging from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin.

Installment number 1- http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2015/11/justin-fox12-instalment-1.html

Sources

http://www.iep.utm.edu/locke/#H1

http://www.biography.com/people/john-locke-9384544#early-life