John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism".
69 Facts About John Locke
2.
John Locke's writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries.
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John Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness.
4.
John Locke postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa.
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John Locke was baptised the same day, as both of his parents were Puritans.
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John Locke found the works of modern philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the university.
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John Locke had been looking for a career and in 1667 moved into Ashley's home at Exeter House in London, to serve as his personal physician.
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In London, John Locke resumed his medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham.
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John Locke coordinated the advice of several physicians and was probably instrumental in persuading Ashley to undergo surgery to remove the cyst.
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John Locke became involved in politics when Ashley became Lord Chancellor in 1672.
11.
John Locke returned to England in 1679 when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn.
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Around this time, most likely at Shaftesbury's prompting, John Locke composed the bulk of the Two Treatises of Government.
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John Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot, although there is little evidence to suggest that he was directly involved in the scheme.
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John Locke did not return home until after the Glorious Revolution.
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John Locke did not quite see the Act of Union of 1707, though the thrones of England and Scotland were held in personal union throughout his lifetime.
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John Locke exercised a profound influence on political philosophy, in particular on modern liberalism.
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Michael Zuckert has argued that John Locke launched liberalism by tempering Hobbesian absolutism and clearly separating the realms of Church and State.
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John Locke had a strong influence on Voltaire, who called him "le sage Locke".
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John Locke's arguments concerning liberty and the social contract later influenced the written works of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers of the United States.
20.
John Locke redefined subjectivity, or self, leading intellectual historians such as Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel to argue that John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding marks the beginning of the modern Western conception of the self.
21.
John Locke's tract, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, which was widely read in the mother country, was a passionate plea for absolute religious freedom and the total separation of church and state.
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John Locke further says that Locke was paid in Royal African Company stock in lieu of money for his work as a secretary for a governmental sub-committee and that he sold the stock after a few years.
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Brewer likewise argues that John Locke actively worked to undermine slavery in Virginia while heading a Board of Trade created by William of Orange following the Glorious Revolution.
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John Locke supported child labour, which was an intrinsic part of all pre-industrial societies.
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John Locke suggests, therefore, that "working schools" be set up in each parish in England for poor children so that they will be "from infancy [three years old] inured to work".
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John Locke goes on to outline the economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish, but that they will instill a good work ethic in the children.
27.
Unlike Thomas Hobbes, John Locke believed that human nature is characterised by reason and tolerance.
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John Locke advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances.
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John Locke stresses that inequality has come about by tacit agreement on the use of money, not by the social contract establishing civil society or the law of land regulating property.
30.
John Locke is aware of a problem posed by unlimited accumulation, but does not consider it his task.
31.
John Locke just implies that government would function to moderate the conflict between the unlimited accumulation of property and a more nearly equal distribution of wealth; he does not identify which principles that government should apply to solve this problem.
32.
John Locke's general theory of value and price is a supply-and-demand theory, set out in a letter to a member of parliament in 1691, titled Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.
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John Locke concludes that, as far as money is concerned, the demand for it is exclusively regulated by its quantity, regardless of whether the demand is unlimited or constant.
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John Locke explains demand for goods as based on their ability to yield a flow of income.
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John Locke develops an early theory of capitalisation, such as of land, which has value because "by its constant production of saleable commodities it brings in a certain yearly income".
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John Locke considers the demand for money as almost the same as demand for goods or land: it depends on whether money is wanted as medium of exchange.
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John Locke believes that silver and gold, as opposed to paper money, are the appropriate currency for international transactions.
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John Locke argues that a country should seek a favourable balance of trade, lest it fall behind other countries and suffer a loss in its trade.
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John Locke develops his theory of foreign exchanges, in addition to commodity movements, there are movements in country stock of money, and movements of capital determine exchange rates.
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John Locke considers the latter less significant and less volatile than commodity movements.
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John Locke prepares estimates of the cash requirements for different economic groups.
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John Locke uses the concept of property in both broad and narrow terms: broadly, it covers a wide range of human interests and aspirations; more particularly, it refers to material goods.
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John Locke argues that property is a natural right that is derived from labour.
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From this premise, understood as a labour theory of value, John Locke developed a labour theory of property, whereby ownership of property is created by the application of labour.
45.
John Locke defines the self as "that conscious thinking thing, which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends".
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John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind.
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John Locke wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences".
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John Locke argues that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self; they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa.
49.
John Locke was critical of Descartes's version of the dream argument, with John Locke making the counter-argument that people cannot have physical pain in dreams as they do in waking life.
50.
John Locke was at times not sure about the subject of original sin, so he was accused of Socinianism, Arianism, or Deism.
51.
John Locke argued that the idea that "all Adam's Posterity [are] doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment, for the Transgression of Adam" was "little consistent with the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God", leading Eric Nelson to associate him with Pelagian ideas.
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John Locke retained the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures.
53.
John Locke was convinced that the entire content of the Bible was in agreement with human reason.
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John Locke's political thought was based on Protestant Christian views.
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Additionally, John Locke advocated a sense of piety out of gratitude to God for giving reason to men.
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John Locke derived the fundamental concepts of his political theory from biblical texts, in particular from Genesis 1 and 2, the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, the teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul the Apostle.
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John Locke derived from the Bible basic human equality, the starting point of the theological doctrine of Imago Dei.
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John Locke compared the English monarchy's rule over the British people to Adam's rule over Eve in Genesis, which was appointed by God.
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John Locke was an assiduous book collector and notetaker throughout his life.
60.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, John Locke took care to catalogue and preserve his library, and his will made specific provisions for how his library was to be distributed after his death.
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The printed books in John Locke's library reflected his various intellectual interests as well as his movements at different stages of his life.
62.
John Locke travelled extensively in France and the Netherlands during the 1670s and 1680s, and during this time he acquired many books from the continent.
63.
The Bodleian holds a copy of Robert Boyle's General History of the Air with corrections and notes Locke made while preparing Boyle's work for posthumous publication.
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Locke e 18 includes some of Locke's thoughts on the Glorious Revolution, which Locke sent to his friend Edward Clarke but never published.
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John Locke's notes are often abbreviated and are full of codes which he used to reference material across notebooks.
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John Locke published his method in French in 1686, and it was republished posthumously in English in 1706.
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John Locke had some of his books interleaved, meaning that they were bound with blank sheets in-between the printed pages to enable annotations.
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John Locke interleaved and annotated his five volumes of the New Testament in French, Greek, and Latin.
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John Locke did the same with his copy of Thomas Hyde's Bodleian Library catalogue, which John Locke used to create a catalogue of his own library.