Philosophy 174

This course will be a close examination of one of the most important and influential books of the early modern period: John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Essay was a central source of (modern) empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries, and paved the way for later empiricist philosophers such as Berkeley and Hume. In it Locke discusses the “origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge,” which he uses to address problems in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion. In this course we will study the arguments of the Essay while also keeping in mind the scientific and philosophical contexts in which the work was written.