Hello everyone, here is a small broadcast reading, today we continue to share the British empiricist philosopher: john Locke's philosophical thought. Locke is the founder of modern Western empiricist philosophy, but in fact, empiricism was not the first of Locke, but Locke put forward systematic empiricist epistemological thought, the source of knowledge made a systematic exposition, before systematically introducing the "Human Understanding" and Locke's epistemological philosophical thought, today we first introduce the origin process of British empiricism.
We introduced Bacon before, Bacon was born in 1561, died in 1626, and 6 years after his death, Locke was born. In fact, Bacon was the real founder of British empiricism. Bacon proposed the famous "knowledge is power", and the knowledge here comes from practice and experience, Bacon is also the founder of modern experimental science, and has made great contributions to modern science and philosophy. More than 1,000 years before Bacon, the mainstream western thought was deeply influenced by Aristotle, Aristotle proposed the famous deductive method, through rational deduction to obtain deterministic knowledge, is the mainstream of thought, knowledge should have certainty, should be based on logical reasoning.
The famous deductive syllogism is.
The big premise is that people are inherently dead
The small premise is that Socrates is a man
So the conclusion is that Socrates will die too
Knowledge is obtained in this way, on the basis of a universal truth, through the continuous reasoning of the method of deduction, but Bacon questioned this way of acquiring knowledge in the book "New Tools", the deductive method can obtain certain knowledge, but the deductive method cannot expand our knowledge, in other words, the conclusions derived from the deduction method are actually included in the big premise, such as Socrates will die, this conclusion, is only a special case of the great premise of man's inherent death, so Bacon thinks , the deductive method can not expand our cognition, human beings want to progress, the method of acquiring knowledge needs to change, Bacon proposed the famous induction method, that is, from a large number of practical experience, through a certain step to summarize the new knowledge, "practice can produce true knowledge" This is the starting point of Bacon's empiricist thought, but also for the later development of empiricism in Britain laid the foundation.
After Bacon, Hobbes, also a British philosopher and statesman, based on Bacon, gave a more complete explanation of the process of the formation of empirical knowledge. Hobbes was a philosopher of Western empiricism, and like Bacon, he believed that knowledge began with sensory experience, that sensory experience was the initial origin of all knowledge, and on the basis of sensation, an impression of something was formed, and then the impression was named, a concept was formed, and then the relationship between the concept and the concept formed the entire knowledge system. Hobbes summarized the process of knowledge formation into a relatively complete system.
In addition, Hobbes was also a materialist, believing that the universe is the union of all things, is material, and that any part of matter is matter. He also created the complete system of mechanical materialism, stating that the universe is the sum of all mechanically moving, extended objects. He saw any kind of moving object as a machine, and thought that the universe was actually part of a more powerful machine. For example, Hobbes explained motion as displacement, and the movement of the position of matter, which has a very typical "mechanistic" thinking, and this explanation even influenced the classical mechanics of Later Newton. It can be said that by Hobbes's case, the philosophy of empiricism has begun to take shape, but it is not specific and detailed enough.
A few years after Bacon's death, Locke was born, and he inherited the empiricist tradition of Bacon and Hobbes, proposing his own complete system of empiricist thought in The Theory of Human Understanding. In the book, he first made a fierce criticism of the rationalism of the European continent at that time, especially the rationalism represented by Descartes. Before Locke, the French philosopher Descartes proposed the "concept of talent", which descartes believed that the most basic knowledge or concept of human beings is not aided by feelings and experiences, but is innate, innate or innate. More precisely, many of man's innate ideas are given by God and are born with him, such as the concept of God, the concept of geometry, the basic concept of logic, the law of identity and the theory of contradiction, and so on.
But Locke explicitly opposed the "concept of talent", he believed that there is no so-called concept of talent, Locke put forward the famous "whiteboard theory", meaning that people are born like a blank piece of paper, all our cognition comes from acquired experience. It is the acquired education and practice that slowly accumulates experience, and through the way of experience, the concept of various knowledge will slowly form in the mind. So how is knowledge formed?
Locke began with experience, and he divided experience into two types: the experience of feeling and the experience of reflection. The experience of feeling comes from the external world of sensory feelings, that is, a kind of reaction of people to external stimuli, such as feeling hot, hot, warm, and sweet are all a kind of sensory experience; and the experience of reflection comes from spiritual feelings, such as happiness, pain, depression are all internal feelings, these feelings are not obtained through reasoning, it is a reflection on experience. But introspection here is different from our understanding of "introspection", it is more like an intuition, an intuitive feeling without thinking and reasoning.
Feeling gaining external experience, reflecting on gaining inner experience, is what Locke calls "dual experience theory." Locke emphasized that these two experiences were the only source of knowledge, but that they were not yet knowledge per se, and that the object of knowledge was ideas. If we compare feeling and reflection to a pipe, then the water in the pipe is really knowledge, and the water is composed of countless ideas. The judgment or conclusion of ideas is true knowledge. For example, boiling water is hot, apples are sweet, and so on.
Locke also divided ideas into simple ideas and complex ideas, the only thing we can perceive is the simple idea, and we can form a complex idea from many simple ideas. Simple ideas such as the apple is red and the sky is blue, or the simple idea of reflection gained from experience, a sad or joyful idea. Complex concepts are concepts formed after processing, combining, classifying, and sorting out multiple simple concepts. Complex ideas are compounds of simple ideas. For example, apples are red, apples are round, and apples are sweet, these are all simple concepts, and then combined to form the complex concept of "apple".
Complex ideas fall into three categories: styles, relationships, and entities. Form is the way in which simple ideas are combined; relations are the relations between simple ideas; and the idea of substance, Locke, is divided into material entities and spiritual entities. For example, at the beginning we called "apple" is a material entity. But the complex ideas of this material entity cannot be directly felt, the entity is not the object of experience, we can only feel that it is a simple idea. Material entities cannot be perceived, and the same spiritual entities cannot be perceived, such as the reflection experience produced in our hearts, such as happiness, depression, sadness, etc., there must be a subject, this subject is "me" or the spiritual level of the "self", this "I" can not be directly perceived, can only be perceived through the emotional feelings of happiness and sadness, and in fact, the proposal of the concept of self is also a very important contribution of Locke's philosophical thought.
Today we have a brief understanding of the origin of empiricism in Britain, and briefly introduce the empiricist ideas of Bacon Hobbes and Locke respectively. It is clear that Locke's empiricist ideas are more complete and systematic than the ideas of Bacon and Hobbes. Therefore, we also call Locke the founder of modern Western empiricism. In the next video, we officially begin to share Locke's classic masterpiece "Human Understanding" to systematically understand Locke's empirical epistemological philosophical system, first of all, let's see how Locke refuted Descartes' concept of talent.
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