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OK. Now we come to John Locke. John Locke was a huge philosophical influence for centuries.

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Both in political theory and in theoretical philosophy.

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He was undoubtedly the biggest philosophical influence on the 18th century.

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So when you come to later philosophers, Locke's shadow is there throughout.

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He's famous as the first British empiricist Locke Barclay, whom?

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He was at Christchurch for a long time. He fled overseas to Holland and then came back.

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At the time, the Glorious Revolution. Sixteen eighty eight.

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Very soon afterwards, he published his essay concerning human understanding and his two treatises of government,

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both enormously influential works in their different spheres. Now, Locke was a friend of Boyle.

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I mentioned that Boyle was working in Oxford. Locke was in Oxford.

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He thought that Boyle's theory of corpuscular arianism was the best currently available.

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And if if you leave, if you read Locke, it's very useful to have in mind the comparison with Boyle.

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The terminology is slightly different. Boyle talked about universal matter.

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As is the stuff out of which all the corpuscles are made. Locke talked about pure substance in general.

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Boyle talked about matter being impenetrable. Locke talked about solidity.

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Again, he wanted to say that the underlying substance has primary qualities shape, size, movement, texture and solidity.

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The secondary qualities, the sensory qualities that we we detect through our five senses.

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They are in bodies only as powers to produce ideas in us.

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So if I see something that's yellow, what's in the body is nothing like my idea of yellow.

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Rather, the body has a corpuscular structure which gives it a power to cause that idea of yellow in me.

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That's what it is for something to be yellow. Now locks famously an empiricist, the word empiricist is used an awful lot,

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and it can be rather confusing when you hear people say, oh well, they're a rationalist and there are empiricists.

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The rationalists are Descartes, Liveness, Spinoza and the empiricists Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

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This is very, very simplistic. Essentially, an empiricist is someone who puts a lot of weight on experience experience as opposed to pure reason.

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But there are different respects in which one can be an empiricist lock.

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Most notably is an empiricist in that he thinks that all our ideas are derived from experience.

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Every idea we have is, as it were, copied from what we sense or experience.

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Whereas Descartes thought that some of our ideas were implanted right from the very beginning,

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the idea of God, the idea of extension according to Descartes.

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Those of their innately in our minds. Whereas Locke would want to say that we get the idea of God from experience through experience.

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We get to know other people. We get the idea of power. We get the idea of knowledge.

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We get the idea of goodness. And then we can form the idea of God.

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By extrapolating these and forming the idea of a perfectly good, knowledgeable.

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Powerful being. OK.

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So that's one kind of empiricism, another kind of empiricism has to do with where we get our knowledge, and that's different.

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All right. Somebody could say that we have certain innate ideas, but all our knowledge about them comes from experience.

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But Lokke is empiricists pretty much in both ways. He thinks that all our ideas are derived from experience.

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And he thinks that virtually all of our knowledge comes from experience, too.

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Whereas Descartes thought that we have some innate ideas and also thought that

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some knowledge that we had could come from pure reason without experience.

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Locke is characteristically modest. He thinks that because all our knowledge comes from experience, it's inherently fallible.

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We we can't look inside our minds and find there a perfect faculty of reason that's gonna tell us with certainty how things will behave.

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We just learn by experience how things to be things behave. And obviously, that is fallible.

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We presume that substances have a real essence and underlying structure that gives rise to their observed properties.

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But we don't really know anything about that. We just have to make do with what we know of substances.

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We have to rely on defining them in terms that we can understand.

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So, for example, suppose you tried to think what we mean by the word gold.

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What's gold? Well, we find lumps of gold around the world.

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No rings and so forth, and they seem to behave in a similar way.

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In both in their weight, in their malleability and their colour, in how they react to other substances like dissolving it, dissolving in Aqua Regia.

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If you're imprudent enough to put your ring in a beaker of it.

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So we suppose that there is something that is common to these some real lessons.

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But in practise, we cannot know what the real essence is.

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We can't penetrate into the nature of substances.

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We do not have microscopic allys. So we have to make do with knowing things like the colour and the malleability and the density and so forth.

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That is how we have to understand substances. Locks also a probable list.

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Whereas Descartes had an ideal of perfect knowledge.

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Absolutely incontrovertible certainty. Locke said that most of the time we have to make do with probability.

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So one important thing that we'll see is is pretty important for understanding Hume when we come to the issue of induction.

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Locke thought that our reason works in two different ways. Suppose we go through a mathematical proof.

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We start with certain premises and then by a logical deduction, step after step up the step, we come to a particular conclusion.

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That's an example of demonstration. And the way demonstration works is that using our reason,

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we see the infallible connexion between the premise and the intermediate step and then the next intermediate step.

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We see these connexions with our reason. What about a probable argument, a probable argument is where we all we can achieve is probability.

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So, for example, when we're working out what the weather might be tomorrow.

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We start from certain bits of evidence. We go step by step through the arguments in the same sort of way.

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But instead of having infallible connexions to guide us, we just have probable connexions.

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So our reason enables us to see these probable connexions and thus reach reasonable beliefs.

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But there are some respects in which Locke goes towards the rationalist side.

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I've said the simplistic distinction between empiricists and rationalists really can be misleading.

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Here's an example, famous quotation from Locke.

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If we could discover the texture and so forth of the mind nute constituent parts of bodies, we should know without trial.

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Several of their operations.

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In other words, if we did have microscopic allys, if we could look into the micro structure of gold or whatever it is we could know without trial.

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Without experiment. The way it was gonna behave. He seems to be suggesting that we could have this kind of perfect,

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rational insight into how things behave if only we were able to penetrate that structure.

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That is actually quite a rationalistic claim.

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It's claiming that we can know what seems to be claiming that we can know some of the laws of how things behave a priori.

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I without experience. Without experiment. Another example, a typical example is proof of the existence of God.

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Locke thought that you could prove the existence of God by a sort of cosmological argument.

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There must be a first cause of the universe. And because matter by itself can never give rise to thought.

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It follows that the first calls of the universe must be a thinking thing.

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But look included an interesting speculation in his essay, and it was very, very controversial.

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He speculated that although matter by itself could never give rise to thought.

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Remember, this is a very, very important theme at the time. Okay.

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It's the key argument against hobs. That matter cannot give rise to thought.

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And Locke agrees with that. But nevertheless, he speculates that God could make matter, think if he wanted to.

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So although a stone by itself could never just think if God could implant in the stone the power of thought.

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Why not? God's omnipotent God can do anything. Why shouldn't he make matter?

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Think. Well, this stirred up a hornet's nest.

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All these people who'd been arguing against Lott, against Hobbs, accused Locke two of impiety.

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This was a monstrous suggestion, the idea that matter could could even in principle think that even God could make matter, think.

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And you can see in the light of what we've said, why it's a particularly sensitive issue.

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I've mentioned that Locke was very agnostic. He didn't think that we could penetrate the nature of things.

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We had to rely on their superficial qualities, what we could observe through the senses.

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That didn't give us knowledge about underlying realities. You can see that that's a bit of a problem with personal identity.

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What is it that makes me now the same person as I was a day ago or a year ago or 10 years ago?

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Well, we can't look into the essence of ourselves any more than we can look into the essence of gold.

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So this is a major problem,

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what how do we make sense of morality if we cannot understand what it is that makes one person the same person throughout their life?

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And what about the afterlife, given that when I die, my body will decay?

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What is it about me that makes me in the afterlife the same person as me now?

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Again, this was considered a crucial issue because divine retribution,

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punishment for ills done in this life or reward for goodness is considered a crucial part of the moral and religious world.

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So when we come to personal identity, which we will do in a later lecture, bear this in mind.

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It's a particularly crucial issue for someone who takes locks sort of view of the universe.