Upload to Google Docs

John Locke was born the 29^th of August 1632, he began as an attorney and served as a clerk in Chew Magna early in the English Civil War. John was sent to Westminster school in London with a sponsorship from Alexander Popham who was a member of parliament and Alexander was also John’s father’s former commander. John was a very capable student although he did not like the undergraduate curriculum at Westminster School and then went to pursue medicine and experimental philosophy through a friend Richard Lower. John Locke was an English Philosopher and a great physician; he was also known as the “father of liberalism”. Locke achieved a bachelor’s degree in 1656 and received a master’s degree in 1658. John Locke was equally important to the social contract theory. Social contract theory is the view that someone’s moral or political obligations are dependent upon the society in which they live.

Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. By backing the claim that man is naturally free and equal, he disagreed with the idea that God made man naturally subject to be ruled over. Locke avoided the problem that the Bible teaches things that are contrary to natural law because while interpreting the Biblical passages he had a consistency/criterion about the natural law. His theory of association heavily influenced the subject of modern psychology. At the time, the empiricist philosopher’s recognition of two types of ideas, simple and complex, inspired a great many other philosophers like David Hume, and George Berkeley to revise and expand his theory, to apply it to how humans gain knowledge in the physical world.

Locke’s theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as David Hume, Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pew-existing concepts, he maintained that man is born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is determined by experience, now known as empiricism. An example of Locke’s belief in this can be seen in his quote “Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it is not true, my hand shall be the most forward to throw it into the fire.” This shows his ideology of science in his observations in that something must be capable of being tested repeatedly and that nothing is exempt from being disproven.

Locke’s use of the word property in a broad sense covers the wide range of human interests and aspirations. In a narrow sense he refers to a man’s material goods. He says that property is a natural right derived from labor that was exerted to produce those goods. He stated his belief that nature on its own provides little value to society implying that the aforementioned labor is what gives goods their value. This position is what some would call the labor theory of value. He assumed that the right to defend it in the state of nature wasn’t enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way, with help from the government.

Phillip Melton. Section #5

Runs since remote learning, 10

Comment Links

http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2020/05/final-report-blog-post-modern-day.html

 http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2020/05/final-report-carson-eskew.html

Sources

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke#Life_and_work