John Locke

The chapter opens with a quick biography of John Locke. I then endeavour to delineate his epistemology as documented in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. What follows is Locke’s criticism of the claim for the existence of innate ideas. He takes it that it is the received position to support the existence of innate ideas, ideas pertaining to purely speculative or theoretical matters as well as ideas concerning practical matters such as morality. However, according to Locke, the mind is a white paper and is only filled with inscriptions via our experiences. Ideas derived from experience come to us through sensation or reflection. Locke makes a distinction between simple and complex ideas.