ipl-logo

John Locke's Theory Of Mind Essay

1018 Words5 Pages

John Locke was a highly influential English Philosopher during the 17th century (1632-1704) and had ideas of political philosophy that happen to carry its relevance in today's time. He had a wide variety and range regarding the topics of which he discussed and was knowledgeable in such as epistemology, political philosophy, and religious philosophy. One of Locke's biggest theories, was the theory of mind which is also known as "Tabula Rasa", which translates from Latin to "blank slate" in English. In this theory, he believed that we are born as "blank slates", essentially meaning that we are nothing until we experience things and learn from those occurrences that happen in our life. The analogy I came up with while trying to mull over the definition …show more content…

The thought of things not actually existing, just the properties, gave people extreme confusion since they have never had this perspective before. The example that can be used to further explain this theory to people is to think the properties of a Granny Smith Apple: round, green, shiny, smooth, firm, and sour. Now, try to imagine the apple without any of those properties, the apple eventually goes into non-existence since there is nothing to see, feel, touch, taste, or smell. The properties simply are there because that is the way the apple projects itself into existence in the world. Hume also applied this to many other things as well, one being the existence of …show more content…

This completely opposed the famous quote from Descartes, "I think, therefor I am". This is because Hume used the same process of breaking down an object until there are no properties to prove its existence. Descartes thought that he existed because of the fact that he was thinking that he existed, but Hume used the counterargument that him having that thought did not physically prove that he existed, it only proved that he had senses; which further proved his beliefs that we only experience things through sensory

Show More
Related

  • How Does Hume Undermine The Existence Of God

    311 Words  | 2 Pages

    Atheism is not only a lack of belief in God (for one does not call a newborn an atheist for lack of experience) but a disbelief in God. Although Hume’s work does not actively work to disprove God, certain notions contained within the text serve to undermine the existence of God. First, Hume claims that the concept of God arises a reflection of one’s own mind and its operation with the unlimited qualities of goodness and wisdom. It can easily be interpreted to mean that humanity created the idea of God. God is not innately an impression of which humans naturally come to know, but simply an augmentation like a “gold mountain”.

    Read More

  • John Locke's Argument For The Existence Of God

    732 Words  | 3 Pages

    In John Locke’s, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke develops an argument for the existence of God. In the the following paper, I shall first reconstruct Lockes’ argument for his claim of God’s existence. I shall then identify what I take to be the weakest premise of the argument and explain why I find it in need of justification. The following is a reconstruction of Lockes’ argument: 1) Man has a clear perception of his own being 2)

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast John Locke And Montesquieu

    1227 Words  | 5 Pages

    These ideas were expressed in his “Tabula Rasa Theory of Human Behavior”. In his writing, Locke says,”Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas—How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.”

    Read More

  • Analysis Of David Hume's Argument From Design

    1204 Words  | 5 Pages

    Many of Hume’s objections to the argument may be brushed off by those who are blindly religious and take offense, but many, from the same pool of objections, are simply logical and commonsensical, while some are too rigid. This a posteriori argument for design comes from the desire to make a second case for God. The first was the ontological argument, or cosmological argument, which attempts to use pure reason to

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Descartes And Hume

    1404 Words  | 6 Pages

    Both philosophers acknowledged that the self was integral to the origin on the knowledge. The self was the start to philosophical reflection. Although Hume did not share the belief in the existence of the self compared to Descartes, he understood humanities with it; "our propension to confound identity with relation is so great, that we are apt to imagine something unknown and mysterious connecting the parts (126) " This exemplifies that Hume is conscious of the wants and desires of humans with their mind and soul.

    Read More

  • Essay On Cartesian Dualism

    703 Words  | 3 Pages

    This paper will critically examine the Cartesian dualist position and the notion that it can offer a plausible account of the mind and body. Proposed criticisms deal with both the logical and empirical conceivability of dualist assertions, their incompatibility with physical truths, and the reducibility of the position to absurdity. Cartesian Dualism, or substance dualism, is a metaphysical position which maintains that the mind and body consist in two separate and ontologically distinct substances. On this view, the mind is understood to be an essentially thinking substance with no spatial extension; whereas the body is a physical, non-thinking substance extended in space. Though they share no common properties, substance dualists maintain

    Read More

  • Analysis Of John Locke's Memory Criterion

    1668 Words  | 7 Pages

    If you were unconscious, you would not wake up to the water on your skin or the noise around you. Therefore, one is not fully unconscious when sleeping, there is a continuation of consciousness. This proves that if we are being defined as a person who is the same person due to a continuation of consciousness, then after sleeping, we are still the same person. On the other hand, no one remembers being born, we have no conscious recollection of that moment and the moments roughly before the age of 3, this is also known as infantile amnesia. Therefore, Locke will say that we are not the same person now, to when we were born because we have no memory of that time, resulting in a non-continuous trail of

    Read More

  • Hume Personal Identity

    458 Words  | 2 Pages

    The primary source material for discussion of Hume's " theory" of personal identity Book I,Part IV is stated that "The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies." In this passage Hume's main argument is based on the personal identity which is a fictional that ascription of identity over time to persons is a mistake. One we all make a mistake and that is why it is explicable. Hume characterized the identity to the perceptions because there is no such a thing as personal identity that can attributed to humans. One of the important perception that Hume mentions is that relations of resemblance and causation.

    Read More

  • Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, By David Hume

    182 Words  | 1 Pages

    David Hume’s used various theories to prove that

    Read More

  • David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

    559 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Hume overall, all of our ideas and “feeble perceptions” are founded by impressions (Hume). Basically, Hume insists that all ideas can be traced back and associated with the root impression that one first had. This passage begins with Hume justifying that the mind can conceive anything that we have not previously seen and explains that nothing is beyond what we can think unless there is a complete contradiction such as a square that is circle- “To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes…costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects” (Hume). These ideas are explained to be copies of the impressions we have already experienced, and ideas must proceed from our first impressions of an experience (our senses- what we see, feel, hear, desire, ect.).

    Read More

  • John Hume And Kant's Theory Of Morality

    1328 Words  | 6 Pages

    While Hume’s challenge is by observing the notion of exclusive truth proposed by empiricists or rationalist which

    Read More

  • Descartes Vs Hume

    1023 Words  | 5 Pages

    He is saying that without something being conveyed to us through one off the five senses we cannot imagine it and therefore cannot believe it to be true. We rely heavily on our senses when it comes to matters of reason and our quest for knowledge as we can only know for certain what we have felt, seen, smelt, or heard for ourselves. Without our senses and their bases in absolute truth we cannot be considered reliable, as he said, “We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pineapple, without having actually tasted it.” (Humes 3). This relates to his

    Read More

  • George Berkeley: Esse Est Percipii

    1494 Words  | 6 Pages

    To put it simply, “To be is to be perceived” or “Esse Est Percipii”. His ultimate refutation of matter is a two part argument. The first part of this argument is governed by the need for a relative substratum backed by the relation it bears to sensible qualities and the lack of clarity around it. The second part of the argument deals with if extension is something distinct from a substratum, and extension is an accident, then each extension will have an underlying extension so on and so forth leading to ad infinitum. He further argues the case for Esse Est Percipii, in how even if you try to conceive a tree, not perceived by the mind it still remains conceived by the mind.

    Read More

  • Hume's Experience And The Limits Of Human Reasoning

    760 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Section IV of Experience and the Limits of Human reasoning, Hume states human reason divides into two kinds. One being relations of ideas and the other being matters of fact. Relations of ideas have no need for experience, also known as a priori, and encompass logically certain statements. An example being three times two equals six.

    Read More

  • David Hume's Argument Analysis

    639 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hume’s expresses this argument in two different ways one is a deductive argument called the, “logical problem with evil which shows that god necessarily does not exist” (Velasquez, 2014p.262). The second is an inductive or probable argument called the,

    Read More

More about John Locke's Theory Of Mind Essay

Open Document