Author Description

How can human beings know anything? And how should they try to live? John Locke (1632-1704) applied his intense moral and intellectual energy to the solution of these fundamental philosophical questions, which still perplex modern thinkers.Locke himself regarded the famous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he argued that human knowledge is founded in experience and reaches us principally through our senses, as his masterpiece. But although it is still the best-known and most admired of his works, its message has been curiously misunderstood.By restoring Locke's theory of knowledge to its proper context as the culmination of the concerns and commitments of a lifetime, John Dunn shows why Locke reached the conclusions he did and why his ideas had such a profound impact on later generations of philosophers and natural scientists.Locke was much less confident that he had solved the problem of how men should conduct their lives. Yet his exposition of the liberal values of toleration and responsible government formed the backbone of enlightened European thought of the 18th century. Even today, most of us in the West, though perhaps few realize it, owe primarily to Locke our conceptions of the meaning of individual life and of political experience.