Locke's philosophy of mind

Abstract

Locke's Essay was an "inquiry into the nature of the understanding." The Inquiry was an epistemological one. Locke was concerned to discover how the understanding became stocked with ideas, how it used them to know, and how it worked differently with them when it merely believed. He was also concerned to show that his singularly empirical account of how the understanding acquired its ideas and operated with them, did not rule out as somehow illicit, notions like those of space and time which seem far removed from sense. Now this thesis is an inquiry into the nature of the understanding as it is described by Locke. But the inquiry here will be only partly epistemological and will be in the main metaphysical. It will be epistemological to the extent that it is concerned with how, according to Locke, the mind comes to know itself. It will be metaphysical, or better, ontological, in that it is concerned with what the understanding is in Locke, i.e., how he characterizes it as a self-contained unit…