can you please criticize the philosophy of john locke?

Answer 1

John Locke's philosophy is so fat, its tabula rasa was mistaken for a runway.

Answer 2

Criticism Of John Locke

Answer 3

Sure. Locke was confused, Hobbes was not.

Locke was smart enough to be an Empiricist, not quite bright enough to be an Existentialist.

Empiricism - All knowledge is derived from experience.
Existentialism - Existence proceeds essence. (E.g. Human nature is how humans behave, not how we wish they would behave.)

As an Empiricist Locke rejected the lunacy of the Platonic forms & then turned around and proclaimed 'Natural Law' was the way things should be, rather than the way they are.

E.g. The American Constitution says we are given, by God, the right to life and liberty. This is a VERY Lockian thing to say, and good attitude for a government to have.

BUT, everyone dies and governments frequently place huge restrictions on liberty.
So how can this be a right?

Hobbes says we have only one right, which is to try to survive.

Locke believed land belongs to those who have worked it and lived on it for a time. Hobbes believed that land belongs to whoever has the power to posses it.

In some sense Locke was the archetypal liberal to Hobbes being the archetypal conservative. Locke would believe peace comes from everyone deciding not to make war. Hobbes believes peace comes from being so strong, everyone is afraid to fight you.

The main critique of Lock is that he is a wishful, rather than a critical thinker.
That he is too much Disney, too little Darwin.

Answer 4

There are a lot of ideas that you might have in mind here: political philosophy? philosophy of religion? epistemology?

I'll stick with the third of those. In epistenology (i.e. the philosophical inquiry into truth and knowledge) Locke is recognized as one of the classical empiricists. He believed that the physical senses are the only source, and are a reliable source, of all human knowledge.

As he developed it, empiricism also involves a sharp distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities. Since his "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding" appeared in 1690, only three years after the appearance of Newton's work on the principles of physics, this distinction can roughly be understood as based on the recent advances in science. A primary quality is the sort of thing that figures into Newtonian physics -- the size, shape, and motion of a body. A secondary quality is the sort of thing that doesn't, that is a more subjective part of our perception -- color, smell, texture.

So in Locke's re-writing of Newton's views the rose really has its size and shape. I give to it its coor and fragrance.

The sharpness of the primary/secondary distinction has come in for a lot of criticism, most especially from Bishop Berkeley.

The contrary argument might be that the distinction is just one of convenience. Color is just as real as mass. Newton set aside the issue of color in order to talk about, say, gravity or inertia, to which it is irrelevant. But that is contingent upon the specific subject (and Newton himself also wrote about optics).

So one might generally criticize Locke here for making into a matter of supposedly grave philosophical importance what was actually just a contingent matter of scientific method at a given moment in history.

Answer 5

OK....................John Locke's philosophy sucks!!

Answer 6

i can't bc i didn't root it any more