Author: Locke, J.
Title: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Publication: in Great Books of the Western World, 1952
Date: 1689 Chicago
Publisher: William Benton
As you can see from the date, this essay is pretty old. If you’re like me, however, old doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Locke has a useful set of ideas, along with a few dubious ones, concerning the way we think. Locke refutes the Cartesian knowledge theory, that human beings are born with innate ideas formed whole in the mind. He believes that rather than hard-coded at birth, ideas come to us through experience and reflection, and that this jumble of ideas, taken all together constitute the ever-expanding whole of human knowledge.
associationism
cognition
psychology
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