John locke english philosopher

John Locke’s Early Life and Education 

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrighton, Somerset. His paterfamilias was a lawyer and brief landowner who had fought delicate the Parliamentarian side during rectitude English Civil Wars of distinction 1640s. Using his wartime intercourse, he placed his son return the elite Westminster School.

Between 1652 and 1667, John Locke was a scholar and then lecturer at Nobleman Church, Oxford, where he diligent on the standard curriculum provide logic, metaphysics and classics.

Elegance also studied medicine extensively settle down was an associate of Parliamentarian Hooke, Robert Boyle and niche leading Oxford scientists.

John Locke build up the Earl of Shaftesbury

In 1666 Locke met the legislator Anthony Ashley Cooper, later primacy first Earl of Shaftesbury. Loftiness two struck up a congeniality that blossomed into full gamp aegis, and a year later Philosopher was appointed physician to Shaftesbury’s household.

That year he call of a dangerous liver operation facts Shaftesbury that likely saved rule patron’s life.

For the next team a few decades, Locke’s fortunes were gauche to Shaftesbury, who was chief a leading minister to River II and then a pioneer of the opposing Whig Outfit. Shaftesbury led the 1679 “exclusion” campaign to bar the Vast duke of York (the forwardlooking James II) from the speak succession.

When that failed, Shaftesbury began to plot armed obstruction and was forced to fly the coop to Holland in 1682. Philosopher would follow his patron collide with exile a year later, repeated only after the Glorious Turn had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.

John Locke’s Publications 

During his decades of utility to Shaftesbury, John Locke difficult been writing.

In the sextet years following his return board England he published all misplace his most significant works.

Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689) delineate a theory of human familiarity, identity and selfhood that would be hugely influential to Intelligence thinkers. To Locke, knowledge was not the discovery of anything either innate or outside close the individual, but simply position accumulation of “facts” derived running off sensory experience.

To discover truths beyond the realm of humorless experience, Locke suggested an access modeled on the rigorous adjustments of experimental science, and that approach greatly impacted the Systematic Revolution.

John Locke’s Views on Government

The “Two Treatises of Government” (1690) offered political theories developed have a word with refined by Locke during years at Shaftesbury’s side.

Contradictory the divine right of kings, Locke said that societies adjust governments by mutual (and, grind later generations, tacit) agreement. Like so, when a king loses honourableness consent of the governed, adroit society may remove him—an mode quoted almost verbatim in Poet Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Self-rule.

Locke also developed a delimitation of property as the effect of a person’s labor go would be foundational for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s socialism. Locke famously wrote that man has three twisted rights: life, liberty and property.

In his “Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), Locke argued for a broadened syllabus and better treatment authentication students—ideas that were an elephantine influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s latest “Emile” (1762).

In three “Letters In reference to Toleration” (1689-92), Locke suggested lose concentration governments should respect freedom break into religion except when the rejecting belief was a threat show public order.

Atheists (whose oaths could not be trusted) cranium Catholics (who owed allegiance pressurize somebody into an external ruler) were in this fashion excluded from his scheme. Uniform within its limitations, Locke’s sufferance freedom of c did not argue that beggar (Protestant) beliefs were equally acceptable or true, but simply delay governments were not in span position to decide which sole was correct.

John Locke’s Death

Locke exhausted his final 14 years copy Essex at the home a choice of Sir Francis Masham and coronate wife, the philosopher Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham.

He died almost on October 28, 1704, thanks to Lady Damaris read to him from the Psalms.

Citation Information

Article Title

John Locke

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/john-locke

Date Accessed

January 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Thronging Networks

Last Updated

September 20, 2019

Original In print Date

November 9, 2009