History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present TimeFalckenberg, Richard
Philosophy
History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time
Falckenberg, Richard
Philosophy, Modern -- History
%(a) Theory of Knowledge.%--Locke's theory of knowledge is controlled by
two tendencies, one native, furnished by the Baconian empiricism, and the
other Continental, supplied by the Cartesian question concerning the origin
of ideas. Bacon had demanded the closest connection with experience as
the condition of fruitful inquiry. Locke supports this commendation of
experience by a detailed description of the services which it renders to
cognition, namely, by showing that, in simple ideas, perception supplies
the material for complex ideas, and for all the cognitive work of the
understanding. Descartes had divided ideas, according to their origin, into
three classes: those which are self-formed, those which come from without,
and those which are innate (p. 79), and had called this third class the
most valuable. Locke disputes the existence of ideas in the understanding
from birth, and makes it receive the elements of knowledge from the senses,
that is, from without. He is a representative of sensationalism,--not in
the stricter sense, first put into the term by those who subsequently
continued his endeavors, that thought arises from perception, that it is
transformed sensation--but in the wider sense, that thought is (free)
operation with ideas, which are neither created by it nor present in it
from the first, but given to it by perception, that, consequently, the
cognitive process begins with sensation and so its first attitude is a
passive one. From the standpoint of the Cartesian problem, which he solves
in a sense opposite to Descartes, Locke supplements the empiricism of Bacon
by basing it on a psychologically developed theory of knowledge. That in
the course of the inquiry he introduces a new principle, which causes him
to diverge from the true empirical path, will appear in the sequel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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