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WIKIBOOKS
DISPONIBILI
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ART
- Great Painters
BUSINESS&LAW
- Accounting
- Fundamentals of Law
- Marketing
- Shorthand
CARS
- Concept Cars
GAMES&SPORT
- Videogames
- The World of Sports

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
- Blogs
- Free Software
- Google
- My Computer

- PHP Language and Applications
- Wikipedia
- Windows Vista

EDUCATION
- Education
LITERATURE
- Masterpieces of English Literature
LINGUISTICS
- American English

- English Dictionaries
- The English Language

MEDICINE
- Medical Emergencies
- The Theory of Memory
MUSIC&DANCE
- The Beatles
- Dances
- Microphones
- Musical Notation
- Music Instruments
SCIENCE
- Batteries
- Nanotechnology
LIFESTYLE
- Cosmetics
- Diets
- Vegetarianism and Veganism
TRADITIONS
- Christmas Traditions
NATURE
- Animals

- Fruits And Vegetables



ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. A Christmas Carol
  2. Adam Bede
  3. Alice in Wonderland
  4. All's Well That Ends Well
  5. A Midsummer Night's Dream
  6. A Modest Proposal
  7. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  8. An Ideal Husband
  9. Antony and Cleopatra
  10. A Passage to India
  11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  12. Arms and the Man
  13. A Room With A View
  14. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
  15. A Study in Scarlet
  16. As You Like It
  17. A Tale of a Tub
  18. A Tale of Two Cities
  19. A Woman of No Importance
  20. Barnaby Rudge
  21. Beowulf
  22. Bleak House
  23. Book of Common Prayer
  24. Candida
  25. Captains Courageous
  26. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
  27. Clarissa
  28. Coriolanus
  29. Daniel Deronda
  30. David Copperfield
  31. Dombey and Son
  32. Don Juan
  33. Emma
  34. Finnegans Wake
  35. Four Quartets
  36. Frankenstein
  37. Great Expectations
  38. Gulliver's Travels
  39. Hamlet
  40. Hard Times
  41. Howards End
  42. Ivanhoe
  43. Jane Eyre
  44. Julius Caesar
  45. Kim
  46. King James Version of the Bible
  47. King Lear
  48. King Solomon's Mines
  49. Lady Chatterley's Lover
  50. Lady Windermere's Fan
  51. Leviathan
  52. Little Dorrit
  53. Love's Labour's Lost
  54. Macbeth
  55. Major Barbara
  56. Mansfield Park
  57. Martin Chuzzlewit
  58. Measure for Measure
  59. Middlemarch
  60. Moll Flanders
  61. Mrs. Dalloway
  62. Mrs. Warren's Profession
  63. Much Ado About Nothing
  64. Murder in the Cathedral
  65. Nicholas Nickleby
  66. Northanger Abbey
  67. Nostromo
  68. Ode on a Grecian Urn
  69. Oliver Twist
  70. Othello
  71. Our Mutual Friend
  72. Pamela or Virtue Rewarded
  73. Paradise Lost
  74. Paradise Regained
  75. Peregrine Pickle
  76. Persuasion
  77. Peter Pan
  78. Pride and Prejudice
  79. Pygmalion
  80. Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  81. Robinson Crusoe
  82. Rob Roy
  83. Roderick Random
  84. Romeo and Juliet
  85. Saint Joan
  86. Salomé
  87. Sense and Sensibility
  88. She Stoops to Conquer
  89. Silas Marner
  90. Sons and Lovers
  91. The Alchemist
  92. The Beggar's Opera
  93. The Canterbury Tales
  94. The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
  95. The Castle of Otranto
  96. The Comedy of Errors
  97. The Dunciad
  98. The Elder Statesman
  99. The Faerie Queene
  100. The Happy Prince and Other Tales
  101. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
  102. The Hound of the Baskervilles
  103. The Importance of Being Earnest
  104. The Jungle Book
  105. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
  106. The Man Who Would Be King
  107. The Master of Ballantrae
  108. The Merchant of Venice
  109. The Merry Wives of Windsor
  110. The Mill on the Floss
  111. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
  112. The Nigger of the Narcissus
  113. The Old Curiosity Shop
  114. The Pickwick Papers
  115. The Picture of Dorian Gray
  116. The Pilgrim's Progress
  117. The Rape of the Lock
  118. The Second Jungle Book
  119. The Secret Agent
  120. The Sign of Four
  121. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  122. The Tempest
  123. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
  124. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
  125. The Vicar of Wakefield
  126. The Waste Land
  127. The Winter's Tale
  128. Timon of Athens
  129. Titus Andronicus
  130. To the Lighthouse
  131. Treasure Island
  132. Troilus and Cressida
  133. Twelfth Night, or What You Will
  134. Typhoon
  135. Ulysses
  136. Vanity Fair
  137. Volpone
  138. Wuthering Heights

 

 
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LITERARY MASTERPIECES
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is one of John Locke's two most famous works, the other being his Second Treatise on Civil Government. First appearing in 1689, the essay concerns the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa) (though it should be noted that he doesn't actually use those 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 Bishop Berkeley.

Book II of the Essay sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas, such as "red," "sweet," "round," etc., 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" 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.

Ideas

Locke's main thesis is that the mind of a newborn is a blank slate and that all ideas are developed from experience. Book I of the Essay is devoted to an attack on the doctrine of innate ideas. Locke allowed that some ideas are in the mind from an early age, but argued that such ideas are furnished by the senses starting at birth: for instance, differences between colors or tastes. If we have a universal understanding of a concept like sweetness, it is not because this is an innate idea, but because we are all exposed to sweet tastes at an early age.

Along these lines, Locke also argued that people have no innate principles. Locke contended that innate principles would rely upon innate ideas, which do not exist. For instance, we cannot have an innate sense that God should be worshipped, when we cannot even agree on a conception of God or whether God exists at all. One of Locke's fundamental arguments against innate ideas is the very fact that there is no truth to which all people attest. He took the time to argue against a number of propositions that rationalists offer as universally accepted truth, for instance the principle of identity, pointing out that at the very least children and idiots are often unaware of these propositions.

Whereas Book I is intended to reject the doctrine of innate ideas proposed by Descartes and the rationalists, Book II explains that every idea is derived from experience either by sensation – direct sensory information – or reflection – mental construction.

Language

The close of Book II suggests that Locke discovered a close relationship between words and ideas that prompted him to include a book on language before moving to discuss knowledge. Book III addresses definitions, names, and the imperfections and abuses of verbal communication. According to Locke's theory of language, the human mind does not have the capacity to grant a name to every single thing it sees, such as individual crows or grains of sand. Man therefore groups ideas into 'general terms', based on the distinguishing features of each individual thing. All cows, for example, have the properties of 'eating grass', 'being milked' etc, and are therefore processed as one large group. When an object or idea has a personal connection to an individual, only then does the need arise for particular names. Hence - to put it crudely - when a specific cow is important to a person, it is brought out of the realm of general ideas, and given a proper name, such as 'Daisy'.


Book III also included Locke's thoughts on some of the major problems in defining terms. Some them include when "the ideas they stand for are very complex, and made up of a great number of ideas put together; where the ideas they stand for have no certain connection to nature; when the signification of the word is referred to a standard, which standard is not easy to be known; where the signification of the word and the real essence of the thing are not exactly the same."

Locke also posited some situations in which language is abused. After stating that the three ends of language were "to convey our ideas, to do it with quickness, and to convey the knowledge of things," Locke noted that words fail when "[they] are used without any ideas, when complex ideas are without names annexed to them, when the same sign is not put for the same idea, when words are diverted from their common use, and when they are names of fantastical imaginations." In connecting the ends and the abuses, the implication seems to be that failure to heed the ends of communication can lead to the abuses mentioned, among others. He sums up the section with this passage: "He that hath names without ideas, wants meaning in his words, and speaks only empty sounds. He that hath complex ideas without names for them, wants liberty and dispatch in his expressions, and is necessitated to use periphrases. He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either be not minded or not understood. He that applies his names to ideas different from their common use, wants propriety in his language, and speaks gibberish. And he that hath the ideas of substances disagreeing with the real existence of things, so far wants the materials of true knolwedge in his understanding, and hath instead thereof chimeras."

Knowledge

All of the previous work that Locke has done in the Essay has been setting up the framework for the investigation of knowledge. In Book IV, Locke finally turns toward knowledge itself, asking what it is and in what areas we can hope to attain it. Locke defines knowledge as "the perception by reason of the connection and agreement or repulsion and disagreement between any two or more of our ideas" (IV.i.2). Because it has only to do with internal relations that hold between ideas knowledge, is not actually of the world itself. Locke identifies four different sorts of agreement and disagreement that reason can perceive in order to produce knowledge: identity and diversity (e.g. A=A); relation (e.g. a diamond is a square laid on its side); coexistence (e.g. that the area of a triangle always equals one half the base time the height); realizing that existence belongs to the very ideas themselves (e.g. the idea of God and of the self). To count as knowledge, the connection between ideas must be very strong. In the case of disagreement, the connection must be one of logical inconsistency, and in the case of agreement, it needs to be a necessary connection. For example, in order to know that A caused B you need to know that given A, B could not have failed to happen. In other words, to know that A caused B, you need to be able to deduce B given only the information that A, or derive B from A. In chapter ii Locke distinguishes between three grades or degrees of knowledge. The highest grade of knowledge is intuition. In intuition, we immediately perceive an agreement or disagreement the moment the ideas are understood. Example of intuitive knowledge are the knowledge that A=A and that all bachelors are unmarried. Understanding what it means to be a bachelor requires feeling the truth of this claim. One grade below intuition is demonstration. In demonstrative knowledge, one must go through some sort of proof to see the connection between ideas. Each step in the proof, however, must be a matter of intuition. An example of demonstrative knowledge would be any proof of geometry. Intuition and demonstration are the only truly legitimate forms of knowledge, so, ultimately all knowledge depends on intuition. There is also, however, a final grade of pseudo-knowledge. This is sensitive knowledge, which is treated at length in Chapter xi. Locke's definition of knowledge was common among 17th century thinkers. Both Rene Descartes and David Hume defined knowledge in much the same way. However, it is tempting to think that this definition is too strong. Consider the following example: I notice that every time my cat makes a sound, it comes out as "meow." In addition, I notice that this same fact holds true of all the cats I have ever come across, and from the testimony of others I gather that the same is true of all cats that anyone has ever observed. While I am tempted to say that I know that all cats say "meow," I have no knowledge of any necessary connection between the cat and the sound "meow." I do not know anything about cats that would show me why cats must say only "meow," nor do I know anything to tell me why they must say "meow" at all. According to Locke, I do not know that all cats say "meow." I may believe this strongly, but I do not know it. Whether or not Locke's definition of knowledge is too strict (and it is not clear that it is; perhaps I really do not know that all cats say "meow), he had good reasons for holding to it. To return to the example above, imagine now that I happen across a cat that makes a sound more like "greck." It turns out I did not know that cats say "meow" after all, since this cat does not. The claim that all cats say "meow" is simply not true, and it is impossible to know something that is not true. I might have thought that I knew that all cats say "meow," but I was mistaken. Is it possible to imagine my coming across such a creature? It is, so long as I do not know of any necessary connection between cats and meows. If, on the other hand, I do know of any such connection, then I know that I will never come across such a cat. To grasp a necessary connection is to know that you will never come across a disconfirming instance. And until you know that you will never come across a disconfirming instance of a rule, can you really know the rule is true? In the absence of this guarantee, there is always the chance that you will happen across something that violates the rule, proving that the rule is wrong and that you could not have known it after all. In all likelihood, this is the reasoning behind Locke's strict definition of knowledge.

Reaction, response, and influence

Locke's empiricist viewpoint was sharply criticized by rationalists. In 1704 Gottfried Leibniz wrote a rationalist response to Locke's work in the form of a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal, the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain ("New Essays on Human Understanding"). At the same time, Locke's work provided crucial groundwork for the work of future empiricists such as David Hume.

References

  • Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.
  • Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1967. s.v. "Locke, John".

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  • John Locke at Project Gutenberg, including the Essay.
  • PDF of early Works 35MBs
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