The Seventeenth-Century Background

The Seventeenth-Century Background
Basil Willey

John Locke

Nayera Saad, Amira Abdel Aziz,
Eman Bastawy & Anan Shendi

Theory of Knowledge:

1.1. Method:
· Locke’s main method that tackles the theory of knowledge puts our own understandings into a test and recognises things which they are adapted to.

1.2. Empiricism:
· “It is well known that we derive all our ideas from Experience, which in turn is made up of Sensations and Reflections.”

1.3. Tabula Rasa:
· God did not force some “truths” upon our minds; but we were supplied with enough amounts for the discovery of all what we need to know. Locke is against “innate” ideas and this is out of his presupposition that we must gain our knowledge and our thoughts out of nature and universe, not depending upon “common notions” which are supposed to be sent from God.

Ideas:

2.1. Simple Ideas:
· These are ideas we get from a single sense and ideas made of more than one sense.

2.2. Complex Ideas:
· These are ideas combined of two or more simple ideas.


Mental operation:

3.1. Perception:
· Knowledge is defined as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas with each other. We perceive, for example, that one idea is different from another, the particular relation one idea holds to another and the co-existence of certain ideas.

3.2. Reflection:
· It is associated with our sensory experience, as our senses transfer to our minds what it had just experienced by reflection.

The Three Degrees of Certainty:

4.1. Intuition (Our Own Existence):
· It “is the perception of self-evident truths, and has the highest degree of certainty”.
· Locke regards our own existence as the first of all certainties: “I think, I reason, I feel pleasure and pain: can any of these be more evident to me than my own existence?” He will not let “thought” be the “essence” of the soul, but makes it rather its function. Locke is not interested in proving the materiality of the soul. He only sees it as an example of the limited extent of human knowledge.

4.2. Demonstration (The Existence of God):
· “It aims at showing the connection between ideas which owing to the distance from each other cannot be compared by simple intuition.” According to Locke it is: “the most obvious truth that reason discovers its evidence being equal to mathematical certainty”. “We more certainly know that there is a God than that there is anything else without us. He sees that it is unwise to only depend on the argument of "the idea of a most perfect being". But at the same time he begins with proving our own existence, and then claims that all the qualities of produced things must be present in the cause. An intelligent being alone could have produced us.”

4.3. Sensation (The Existence of Other Things):
· It “is the ideas we receive from an external object.” He visualised matter in his mind as a collection of invisible atoms varying in their figure and motion.