John Locke

We spent the majority of one lecture talking about John Locke and I think this was perfectly justified, for many reasons.

John Locke obviously captivated Bertrand Russell as a good three chapters were dedicated on educating the reader’s of Locke’s life achievements, contributions to philosophy and the impact that they had upon the population both current and old.

Of course I am slightly biased as he is a Christian and we share many values and therefore I agree with many of his ideas such as God has given mankind the ability to discover knowledge and morality.

Much of Locke’s words were influenced by Newton however Locke had a very individual mindset.  As well as this, Locke lived through many significance periods of history which are believed to have influenced his works suck as the Civil War, Cromwell as a dictator and probably most importantly, the Exclusion Bill. 

His works divided into many important subjects, the two most famous being Social Contract and the Human Understanding. Of these I personally prefer the Social Contract and found that the most interesting as it particularly explores the idea of giving power to humans to make them a ‘moral God’  and linking it to his exploration of God giving Adam the power to ‘rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air’ (Genesis).

Locke was a very important man of his time as his ideas were held highly in politicians opinions for a very long time. I think this is perfectly deserved as respect his opinions, mainly because when creating philosophy, creditability and consistency have not been able to co-exist, and even though Locke hasn’t changed this, he sacrifices consistency for credibility, which I highly respect. On the downside, this opens up opportunities for mass debate but upon reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I’m beginning to think that that was what philosophy surfaced to be for anyway.