Abstract
Locke uses the word “science”, with the force of the Latin word scientia, over twenty times in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is a very important concept in his account of knowledge and its limitations and his understanding of it stands in interesting contrast with other major philosophers in the seventeenth century. In many ways his account seems very straightforward but it also contains some perhaps surprising aspects which call into question the picture of Locke as the commonsense philosopher of standard exegesis. Before we reach those latter points, however, we need to outline his central claims and see them in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries.
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Notes
- 1.
Quotations wil all be taken from the edition of P.H. Nidditch, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, cited by Book, Chapter, Section and page number.
- 2.
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Translated with Notes by Jonathan Barnes, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, Introduction p. xi.
- 3.
Ibid., pp. x–xi.
- 4.
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, Vol. I, pp. 179–180.
- 5.
Many of Descartes’s followers were aware of difficulties in his model of knowledge even though they accepted much of his account of the natural world.
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Rogers, G. (2010). John Locke and the Limits of Scientia . In: Sorell, T., Rogers, G., Kraye, J. (eds) Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3077-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3077-1_9
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