An Essay Concerning Human Understanding information
Philosophical work by John Locke
Not to be confused with An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Title page of the first edition
Author
John Locke
Country
England
Language
English
Subject
Epistemology
Publication date
1689 (dated 1690)
Part of a series on
John Locke
Social contract
Limited government
Tabula rasa
State of nature
Right to property
Labor theory of property
Lockean proviso
Argument from consciousness
Works (listed chronologically)
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Two Treatises of Government
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Of the Conduct of the Understanding
People
Robert Filmer
Thomas Hobbes
1st Earl of Shaftesbury
David Hume
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Adam Smith
Immanuel Kant
Thomas Jefferson
Related topics
Empiricism
Classical liberalism
Polish Brethren
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.
Book I of the Essay is Locke's attempt to refute the rationalist notion of innate ideas. Book II sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas—such as "red", "sweet", "round"—and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us"[1] such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. He also offers a theory of personal identity, offering a largely psychological criterion. Book III is concerned with language, and Book IV with knowledge, including intuition, mathematics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), faith, and opinion.
^Essay, II, viii, 10
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either the soul or the body. Chapter 27 of Book II of his EssayConcerningHumanUnderstanding (1689), entitled "On Identity and Diversity", has been said...
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EssayConcerningHumanUnderstanding (1690), where he says, "I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an Impression...
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information, see the synesthesia in art page). John Locke in AnEssayConcerningHumanUnderstanding (1689) reports: A studious blind man, who had mightily...