In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, John Locke (1632-1704) provides a complete account of how we acquire everyday, mathematical, natural scientific, religious and ethical knowledge. Rejecting the theory that some knowledge is innate in us, Locke argues that it derives from sense perceptions and experience, as analysed and developed by reason. While defending these central claims with vigorous common sense, Locke offers many incidental - and highly influential - reflections on space and time, meaning, free will and personal identity. The result is a...

J. R. and Philip Milton present the first critical edition of John Locke's Essay concerning Toleration, based on all extant manuscripts, and a number of other writings on law and politics composed between 1667 and 1683. Although Locke never published any of these works himself they are of very great interest for students of his intellectual development because they are markedly different from the early works he wrote while at Oxford and show him working out ideas that were to appear in his mature political writings, the Two Treatises of Government and the Epistola de Tolerantia. With...

This is the first major critical edition of Locke's 1695 enquiry into the foundations of Christianity. Locke maintains that the essentials of the faith, few and simple, can be found by anyone for themselves in the Scripture, and that this provides a basis for tolerant agreement among Christians. An authoritative text is accompanied by abundant information conducive to an understanding of Locke's religious thought.

This volume is the first of three which will contain all of Locke's extant writings on philosophy which relate to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, other than those contained in volumes of the Clarendon Edition of John Locke such as the Correspondence. The book contains the two earliest known drafts of the Essay, both written in 1671, and provides for the first time an accurate version of Locke's text together with a record of virtually all his changes, in notes at the foot of each page.

A scholarly edition of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: Correspondence: Letters 849-1241 by E. S. de Beer. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Published in 1689, John Locke's pioneering investigation into the origins, certainty, and extent of human knowledge set the groundwork for modern philosophy and influenced psychology, literature, political theory, and other areas of human thought and expression.

Locke on Money presents for the first time the entire body of the philosopher's writings on this important subject (other than Two Treatises of Government'). Accurate texts, together with an apparatus listing variant readings and significant manuscript changes, record the evolution of Locke's ideas from his original 1668-74 paper on interest to the three pamphlets on interest and coinage published in the 1960s. The introduction Patrick Hyde Kelly establishes the wider context of Locke's writings in terms of contemporary debates on these subjects, the economic conditions of the time, and the...

In philosophical, political, religious and educational thought the philospopher John Locke (1632-1704), inspired the leading minds of both Europe and America. He argued against Descartes and Spinoza's exaggerated rationalism, waking up philosophy to a new empiricism. His ideas formed the moral basis for the ideas of Voltaire, Montesquieu and the French Encyclopedistes, and in America greatly influenced Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Jefferson. This set contains all the famous philosophical works, plus a life of the author. All correspondence is placed together, and the non-correspondence items...

John Locke laid the groundwork of modern liberalism. He argued that political societies exist to defend the lives, liberties and properties of their citizens, and that no government has any authority except by the consent of the people. When rulers became tyrants and act against the common good, then the people have the right of revolution against them. Writing against the backdrop of Charles II's savage purge of the Whig movement, Locke set out to attack fabric of the divine right of rulers. The rights of property- owners, of Native Americans, and of women and children, the need for economic...

A highly influential figure in the Age of Enlightenment in England and France, whose works helped inspire the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, John Locke was one of the most important political theorists in Western history. In The Second Treatise of Government, a major contribution to the principles underlying modern democracies, he achieved two objectives: refuting the concept of the divine right of monarchy, and establishing a theory of government based on the ultimate sovereignty of the people.
In A Letter Concerning Toleration, composed as early as...