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Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher, who
founded the school of empiricism.Locke was born in the village of
Wrington, Somerset, on
August 29, 1632. He was educated at the University of Oxford and
lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from
1661 to 1664. In 1667 Locke began his association with the English
statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, to whom
Locke was friend, adviser, and physician. Shaftesbury secured for
Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of
his official capacities, Locke wrote a constitution for the
proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America, but it was
never put into effect. In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury had
fallen from favor, Locke went to France. In 1679 he returned to
England, but in view of his opposition to the Roman Catholicism
favored by the English monarchy at that time, he soon found it
expedient to return to the Continent. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in
Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
the restoration of Protestantism to favor, Locke returned once more
to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board
of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill
health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.
Locke's empiricism emphasizes the
importance of the experience of the senses in pursuit of knowledge
rather than intuitive speculation or deduction. The empiricist
doctrine was first expounded by the English philosopher and
statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave it
systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa,
a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge, and did not
believe in intuition or theories of innate conceptions. Locke also
held that all persons are born good, independent, and equal.
Locke's views, in his Two Treatises of
Government (1690), attacked the theory of divine right of kings and
the nature of the state as conceived by the English philosopher and
political theorist Thomas Hobbes. In brief, Locke argued that
sovereignty did not reside in the state but with the people, and
that the state is supreme, but only if it is bound by civil and what
he called “natural” law. Many of Locke's political ideas, such as
those relating to natural rights, property rights, the duty of the
government to protect these rights, and the rule of the majority,
were later embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
Locke further held
that revolution was not only a right but often an obligation, and he
advocated a system of checks and balances in government, which was
to comprise three branches, of which the legislative is more
powerful than the executive or the judicial. He also believed in
religious freedom and in the separation of church and state.
Locke's
influence in modern philosophy has been profound and, with his
application of empirical analysis to ethics, politics, and religion,
he remains one of the most important and controversial philosophers
of all time. Among his other works are Some Thoughts Concerning
Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).
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