Chapter 3: Knowledge Innate Ideas and the Empiricist Theory: John Locke Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

John Locke ( ) Spent his early life in the English countryside, including many years at Oxford, where he taught philosophy and the classics until he earned a medical degree and turned to medicine Much of mature life spent in politics Joined a more or less revolutionary group that was fighting for the overthrow of the government Forced to flee England in 1683 and lived in Holland until the Glorious Revolution of 1688

For his part in the struggle, received a government position Spent most of his time writing his Two Treatises on Government (1689) to justify the revolution and its political principles and defending his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which he had written while in exile Generally credited as not only the founder of British empiricism but also the father of modern political liberalism

Locke rejected Descartes’ “intuitions” that allowed him to restore his system of beliefs He therefore rejected Descartes’ exclusively deductive method and supplanted it with a method appropriate to generalizations from experience, or induction Locke rejected the demand for “perfect certainty” and allowed for probability

Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is built on a single premise: that all of our knowledge comes from experience He refuses to accept the notion that we have innate ideas His theory of knowledge is called empiricism

The tabula rasa or “blank tablet” view of the mind is Locke’s most famous epistemological concept Leaving aside special concerns that involve only “the relations between ideas” (mathematics, logic, etc.), all of our ideas are derived from experience

Locke uses three familiar terms: Sensation (data provided by the senses), Ideas (our immediate perception of an object), and Quality (what we have called attribute —redness, roundness, etc.) Locke distinguishes between primary qualities and secondary qualities

Primary qualities are those properties of the objects themselves, such as size and shape; these qualities are inherent in the objects The properties that we see objects as having, such as color or texture (the properties that affect our sense organs), but that don’t exist independently of the objects, he calls secondary qualities

For Locke, substance is “we know not what” However, it is a necessary substrate of qualities This opens the door for Berkeley’s attack on Locke