ABSTRACT
Life. John Locke (1632–1704) was the son of a Puritan, a Parliamentarian lawyer. As a young man, Locke reacted against scholastic philosophy, at the same time taking an interest in natural science, especially medicine and chemistry. He saw it as his vocation to carry out an intellectual ‘cleansing’, that is to say, a critical testing of our knowledge. Locke says that it was the endless discussions of moral and religious questions that moved him to ask whether many of our concepts are not hopelessly unclear and inadequate. He felt that philosophers should proceed gradually and tentatively like natural scientists. Before we can deal with the big questions we need to examine our tools, that is, our concepts. Locke begins therefore with a critique of knowledge and linguistic analysis. But his interest in the ‘tools’ did not keep him from being concerned with the matters at hand: he is one of the classical thinkers in pedagogics and in political theory.
