ABSTRACT
The method adopted in the present work is explained and defended at some length in the Introduction in Volume I, to which the interested reader is referred. First, the work comprises an attempt to recover the meaning and original significance of the main philosophical argument of a single text, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, by reading it in the context of some of the ideas which were current or available at the time it was written, and which, on external or internal evidence, Locke certainly, probably or at least possibly had in mind when writing it. Second, the theory, or complex of interconnected explanatory and polemical models, which emerges from this interpretive enterprise is assessed in comparison both with its antecedent and contemporary rivals, and with later theory and argument, in particular, theories current today. Out of these comparisons, which are not always to the advantage of the present, a systematic response is developed and defended. In the course of comparison an effort is made to maintain a due sense of the historical distance at which Locke's text lies from us. The philosophical value of the exercise, and the light it may be expected to cast on the nature of philosophy itself, depends to a large extent on the very difference between the models and theories compared, and more fundamentally on the effort to avoid anachronistic distortion.
