John Locke

3 Pages 674 Words

John Locke
John Locke was one of the greatest philosophers in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Locke grew up and lived through one of the most extraordinary centuries of English political and intellectual history. Locke was a great Philosopher and a social political theriost that argued that we people can only know ideas, sensations of our ideas, and quality. There are two types of qualities Locke argued primary and secondary. Locke also insisted that we are born into this world as tabla rasa, or blank sheet until experience in the form of sensation provide the basic materials of simple ideas out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed. We are all born with a clean slate and we go through life conceiving ideas, and making choices. Locke had taken some of his own ideas and pulled some from Rene’ Descates another brillant philosophers of this time.
First Locke argued we as people can only know ideas. Locke describes innate ideas as some primary notions. Things that were stamped in the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives when a person is first convieved. Locke rejects the claim that we have innate ideas of God, identity or impossibility because if we did then all childern and idiots would be able to conceive them to. Locke argued that we had two types of ideas one was simple ideas created by our interaction with sensible qualities in things of the sensible world, and simple ideas developed out of our observations concerning the operations of our mind. Locke, although he made a number of remarks these two ideas, he did not explain how it was that sensations excite ideas in the mind. He only states that God produces in us the capacity for doing so. Another thing Locke argues is the fact that we could never know perfect or think of perfect with out some kind of perfect being put in our mind as an idea, which he borrowes from Descartes. So basically Locke did not agree with innate ideas, to m...