John locke french philosopher mathematician

(1632–1704)

English philosopher. Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset and educated at Oxford, where he seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who became his friend and patron. Locke supervised a major operation to remove a hydatid cyst of the liver from Shaftesbury in 1668; the wits of the time found it very amusing that Shaftesbury's liver needed a silver tap for the rest of his life. From 1675 to 1679 Locke lived in France, where he studied the work of Descartes and Gassendi. Shaftesbury, who had been much engaged with parliamentary opposition to the house of Stuart, fled to Holland in 1681, and Locke followed in 1683, returning to England after the accession of William of Orange in 1688. In the course of the next year Locke's major philosophical works, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, as well as the Letter on Toleration, were published, the latter

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John Locke, Reason, and Revelation

Despite his trust in empiricism, throughout his life, Locke never entirely let go of the inspired Scriptures—or perhaps more accurately, the Scriptures never let go of him.

August 29 marked the birthday of John Locke (1632-1704). In many ways, this towering thinker needs no introduction. Yet a brief review of three areas of Locke’s influence will help refresh us on why everyone needs to have at least some basic knowledge of this philosopher.

To begin with, John Locke stands as the greatest of the British empiricists—preeminent among such notables as Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, and David Hume, each of whom has established a lasting legacy in the annals of Western thought.

British empiricism arose as a reaction to the rationalism of the French philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a founding father of the Enlightenment movement. For Descartes, the mind is the starting point—Cogito ergo sum, or “I think therefore I am.” Fo

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Locke’s Philosophy of Science

1. Introduction

Two features of Locke’s intellectual landscape are most salient for understanding his philosophy of science, one of which concerns the new science’s methodology, and the other its content. First, then, is the new methodological approach to understanding the natural world. This approach is accompanied by profound shifts in disciplinary boundaries and in conceptions of induction and scientific knowledge. Locke’s reaction is mostly progressive. Impressed by experimental methods and cognizant of their poor fit with the Aristotelian ideal, he defines a distinct kind of knowledge, one underlägsen to genuine scientific knowledge but appropriate to human sensory capacities. In so doing, he develops an epistemological grund for the new, experimental philosophy. Yet his reaction also has its conservative aspect, one that some see as having limited him in the face of the new science’s evolving methodology. He retains a