Lockes Human Understanding and the Two Treaties on Government - Essay Example

The former became one of Locke’s famous and most influential publications of all time. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was and remains highly regarded for the fact that it is one of the first empiricist works of philosophy regarding human cognition and mind. The Literature is long and complex and tackles a combination of themes centered on the limits of human knowledge, the origin of human ideas as well as religion, and morality (Ben-Chaim).

The literature presents a theory of belief and knowledge that was established on the principle that most human feelings or ideas are normally obtained through experience. In particular, he names describes this phenomenon as the “tabula rasa” or the black slate philosophy. This philosophy presumes that human beings are born with a blank mind that is almost similar to a white sheet of paper. However, the various experiences that human beings normally face when growing up serve to fill up the blank min with new thoughts and ideas.

This means that the fact that two or more individuals can have the same thoughts about a given situation, but their thoughts are not necessarily correct (Newman). He explains that understanding is what sets man above the rest of all other sensible beings, which further confers him to all the advantage and dominion that he has over them. This, therefore, implies that human beings are rational agents capable of choice and, hence, acting responsibly.

He, therefore, insisted that learning should be made pleasant to facilitate the acquisition of new and meaningful experiences bearing in mind that the formation of character for an individual is deemed as very crucial than just mere information (Ward). Indeed, in his paper, Locke further argued that both human adults and children tend to share a common disposition that motivates them to pursue pleasure while avoiding painful experiences. Moreover, he also presented that there are no innate moral ideas; instead, human knowledge consists only of the progressive accumulation of the evidence of the senses. Fiero posits that Locke’s principles about knowledge had a great impact on European and American thoughts toward the adoption of an optimistic view regarding human destiny.

In the modern 21st-century world, some aspects of John Locke’s philosophical writing concerning human understanding are widely accepted. Most learning institutions find Locke’s idea very important in curriculum formation and development. Just as Locke stipulates, education experts also regard the human mind as a blank and should only be filled by good experiences acquired through learning (The Gale Group, Inc). Moreover, because the acquisition of these new ideas tended to occur through a series of steps, curriculum developers normally take this into account such that virtually all school curricula tend to be formed in such a manner that the difficulty level of learning content raises progressively. Read More