OPPapers.com

The Views Of Locke

INTRODUCTION The life-blood of philosophy is argument and counter-argument. Plato and Aristotle thought of this as what they called dialectic discussion. D. W. Hamlyn JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) Locke was the first of the British empiricists who held that our concepts and our knowledge are based on experience. 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 was a believer in God; he accepted the cosmological argument of God as a first cause. Our mere existence proved to Locke that there existed a God, nothing short of an eternal, all powerful, and all knowing Being could possibly have been responsible for the existence of man. It may be, however, that he was not prepared to accept it all in quite this literal way. In his First treatise of Government, for example, he writes: … ‘And therefore I doubt not, but before these words are pronounced, if they must be understood literally to have been spoken… .' He is here referring to Genesis 28:29 at the point at which God confronts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: ‘And God said unto them. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.' This may be an indication that, although a devout Christian, he often wrote for those with a faith more simple than his own. The overall aim of the first treatise was to assert the claim that kings did not rule with arbitrary power, nor by right of inheritance in a direct line from Adam. Filmer claimed that God gave Adam dominion over the earth and all other creatures; Locke that God gave the earth to Adam and all his descendants, who were all...