John Locke
...ng Human Understanding, Locke “attempted to write the natural history of the human understanding, taking the full range of its faculties and operations, from the earliest vague sensations in infants to detailed accounts of the origin of complex and abstract ideas, from the beginnings of self-consciousness to a full science of the mind (Yolton 151). He published Essay in 1690, but continually revised and republished it in later years. The final print of “An Essay is divided into four books; the first is a polemic against the doctrine of innate principles and ideas. The second deals with ideas, the third with words, and the fourth with knowledge” (“Locke”). Locke supported empiricism in this paper, the view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge. He compared the human mind to a “tabula rasa,” or a blank sheet of paper, that is “ready from creation to receive sensations from the outside world and impressions from within” (McGreal 224). “He devoted considerable energy to proving that there was no reliable evidence that such innate ideas exist” (McGreal 223), and in doing so, disproved the theory of the eminent philosopher Plato. This was a monumental feat, and Locke’s theory that all of our ideas come from experience and that the mind has no innate ideas (“Locke”) became his major hypothesis. Locke concluded that there are only 2 ways of human understanding, “by sensation and by reflection of ideas derived from sensation” (“John” 464). It was with these findings on human consciousness (feelings, beliefs, knowledge) that he introduced the birth of cognitive psychology (Yolton 151) and further changed philosophical thinking. Locke also made many contributions to the political world. He wrote several essays on liberty and the rights of the individual, including A Letter Concerning Tolerance and Two Treatises on Government. In the more famous work of the two, Two Treatises, Locke explains that “the purpose of government is the well-being of humankind” (Yolton 57). It “confirms the importance and seriousness for Locke of rationality differentiating men from brutes, a rationality that gives us laws of nature as the framework for freedom” (Yolton 57). Locke believed that if men could be reasonable beings, then they had the right to liberty. These ideas go along with Locke’s most influential and revolutionary theory, the social contract, which “defends the rights o...