Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and EnlightenmentAlthough John Locke has often been called the Enlightenment's great progenitor, his use of the concepts that characterize Enlightenment thought has rarely been examined. In this lucid and penetrating book, Peter A. Schouls considers Locke's major writings in terms of the closely related ideas of freedom, progress, mastery, reason, and education. The resulting intellectual portrait provides a historically nuanced interpretation of a thinker crucial to the development of Western political philosophy and philosophy of education. Schouls centers his analysis on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but he also reexamines the often-ignored texts on education. Stressing the originality of Locke's enterprise, Schouls first explores Locke's reliance on Descartes for a method for the pursuit of general knowledge. He then examines Locke's thinking on (self-)mastery and the importance of reason to its achievement. For Locke, a human being has a radically autonomous nature that enables him or her to attain mastery; nurture may help or hinder this achievement. Turning to the critical role of freedom in the struggle for self-liberation from passions and prejudices, Schouls concludes that, although wrong education explains widespread failure to achieve mastery, right education cannot guarantee its achievement. It is, rather, in the interplay of education, reason, and freedom that Schouls locates the revolutionary promise of Locke's account of human self-fulfillment. |
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... accepting any thing as true or good merely on the grounds that many others accept it and may have done so for a long time , and in accepting as true or good only that which one has personally proved to be true or good . The ...
... accept this as his thinking , that is , as the thinking carried out by the person René Descartes . For this would intro- duce many other givens , not the least of which are the doctrines of soul and body , the realms of mind and matter ...
... accept as true or good an item which they have not criticized , that is , have not submitted to the criteria of clarity and distinctness . Whether or not the belief accepted is in fact true is not the issue . The point is whether the ...
Contents
A Reason and the Nature of a Master | 39 |
The Dogma of Infallible Reason | 73 |
Infallible Reason Prejudice and Passion | 92 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown