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John Locke (1632–1704)

Locke argued that all knowledge derives from experience — that the mind at birth is a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which experience writes. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is the founding text of British empiricism: it rejects innate ideas (against Descartes and Leibniz) and develops an account of how all our ideas — from simple sensations to abstract concepts — are built from the materials that sensation and reflection provide. Locke also formulated the most influential version of the social-contract theory of political authority: government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed, and its function is to protect natural rights (life, liberty, and property). The Two Treatises of Government (1689) provided the philosophical framework for the Glorious Revolution and influenced the American and French revolutions. Hume developed and radicalised the empiricism; Kant attempted to synthesise empiricism and rationalism in response.

Life

Born 29 August 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, England. Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford (BA, 1656; MA, 1658). Studied medicine but did not take a doctorate; practised as a physician. Became secretary and personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury — a political connection that drew Locke into Whig politics and eventually into exile.

Lived in the Netherlands (1683–89) during the political turmoil preceding the Glorious Revolution. Returned to England with William of Orange in 1689. Published the Essay, the Two Treatises, and A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689–90 — the concentrated burst of publication that established his reputation. Spent his later years at Oates, the Essex estate of Damaris Masham, a philosopher in her own right. Died 28 October 1704.

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding

The Essay (1689) argues that the mind has no innate ideas — no ideas or principles present from birth, independent of experience. All ideas originate in two sources: sensation (external experience: what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell) and reflection (internal experience: what we observe about the operations of our own minds — thinking, doubting, willing, believing).

Primary and secondary qualities. Objects have primary qualities (extension, shape, motion, number) that exist in the objects themselves and secondary qualities (colour, sound, taste, warmth) that are produced by the interaction between the object’s primary qualities and the perceiver’s sensory apparatus. The distinction was anticipated by Democritus (“by convention sweet… in reality atoms and void”) and became central to the modern scientific worldview.

Personal identity. Locke argued that personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness — particularly memory — not in continuity of substance (soul or body). A person is the same person they were yesterday because they remember being that person. The proposal was radical and remains debated.

Political philosophy

The Two Treatises of Government (1689) — published anonymously — develops the social-contract theory. In the state of nature, individuals have natural rights (life, liberty, property) and natural duties (not to harm others in their rights). Government is established by consent to better protect these rights. If a government violates the rights it was established to protect, the people have the right to resist and replace it.

The theory grounded political legitimacy in consent rather than in divine right, hereditary succession, or natural hierarchy. Its influence on the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) is direct and acknowledged.

Where Locke stops

The tabula rasa — the blank-slate doctrine — was radicalised by Hume (who drew skeptical conclusions Locke would not have endorsed) and challenged by Kant (who argued that the mind contributes structure to experience through the categories of the understanding). The modern debate — how much of cognition is innate, how much learned — has moved beyond Locke’s framing but the question he opened remains central. Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002) argues against the doctrine; Cosmides and Tooby’s evolutionary psychology posits extensive innate cognitive structure. Whether Locke actually held the extreme blank-slate position his critics attribute to him — or whether his empiricism was more nuanced than the tabula rasa metaphor suggests — is debated among Locke scholars.

The natural-rights framework depends on a concept of natural law that Locke does not fully ground. Locke appeals to God as the source of natural law (God created human beings with natural rights), but the appeal sits uneasily with the empiricism of the Essay — if all knowledge comes from experience, how is natural law known? Hume pressed the point: rights and obligations are human conventions, not features of nature. Whether Locke’s natural-rights theory can survive without the theological foundation is a question that the secular natural-rights tradition (from Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls) has answered in practice, if not in theory.

Key works

See also: Hume · Descartes · Kant