An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  • Submitted By: val1301
  • Date Submitted: 12/01/2013 6:26 PM
  • Category: Philosophy
  • Words: 323
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 80

Locke was the first of the British empiricists who held that our concepts and our knowledge about external world are based on experience and sense perception. He forms his system of knowledge with empiricist idioms, namely: all knowledge comes to us through experience. "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” There is no such thing as innate ideas; there is no such thing as moral precepts; we are born with an empty mind, with a soft tablet ready to be written upon by experimental impressions.
Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, explains that idea act as raw materials, and by knowing the relation of the ideas, we get knowledge. Sensation and reflection are two main sources of ideas of Locke. He laid the foundation for sensism, where all thinking is nothing but a form of sensation. In other words, in order to form an idea in our mind we experience sensation, or the world outside of our body through five senses, as well as reflection, or when the mind turns inward, recognizing ideas about its own functions, such as thinking, doubting, and believing…
Locke states that "idea" is an object of our understanding, and all knowledge is restricted to ideas. According to Locke, instead of the reality of things being the objects of our knowledge, ideas are “…modifications of matter in the bodies…,” and “…most of those ideas of sensation being in the mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the names that stand for them, are the likeness of our ideas.” This means, that we do not really know objects or things-in-themselves, but our mind perceives “…the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea.” In other words, an idea or perception, for Locke, is something we use in our mind to think about things, while an object, in Locke, is what the mind is employed about when thinking.

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