PHILOS 14 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, East Los Angeles College, Empiricism
Document Summary
John locke- best known for an essay concerning human understanding- 1690. Seeks to provide an alternative to the account of human knowledge in descartes. Refuting any claim of innate ideas, all ideas are somehow conveyed into human understanding come from either sensation or reflections from the operation of our own mind. Locke says all of our ideas are derived from experience. Locke, barkley and hume all share this assumption, so ideas come from either sensation or reflection upon the operations of the mind in relation to sensation. Every human being, conscious that he thinks, knows that we have ideas. Has the same basic conception of an idea as descartes- a mental representation. Makes no distinction between the cognitive act of knowing and the thing. Always an indirect relationship between what the mind apprehends and the. Operating with a cartesian conception of idea. The original of all ideas is not the mind itself. actual thing known. themselves.
