Professor Yolton delves into John Locke 's most important work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

This book is a general introduction to the philosophy of John Locke, one of the most influential thinkers in modern times. Nicholas Jolley aims to show the fundamental unity of Locke's thought in his masterpiece, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In this work Locke advances a coherent theory of knowledge; as against Descartes he argues that knowledge is possible to the extent that it concerns essences which are constructions of the human mind.

Locke often writes that our knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. For example, he refers to “our Knowledge consisting in the perception of the Agreement, or Disagreement of any two Ideas” in the second chapter of the Essay's book on knowledge. Similarly, at the beginning of this book he characterizes knowledge as “the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas”. Since commentators remark on this formula so frequently, (...) one would expect that major questions about its interpretation would have been settled long ago. But not so. Controversy still prevails about Locke's intent, and especially about his assumption that the knowledge of the existence of real things counts as an instance of the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas.Scholars have put forward two sorts of problems about the attempted assimilation of knowledge of real existence to Locke's formula. (shrink)

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is John Locke's most important work, and through this selective commentary, first published in 1970, Professor Yolton concentrates our attention on the more interesting and controversial of the doctrines in it. His method of interpretation is to ask very specific questions of the text in order to test the propriety of the philosophical labels traditionally applied to Locke, an approach which he believes yields surprising results. He looks afresh at the various discussions of essence, perception, (...) scientific method, ethics and meaning, and argues that throughout his epistemology Locke is more concerned with problems of description and analysis than with those of justification. This historical perspective is extended by the discussion of issues in the Essay, which retain an independent and philosophical interest. (shrink)