Why read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding?

Book cover of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book description

Includes generous selections from the Essay, topically arranged passages from the replies to Stillingfleet, a chronology, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index based on the entries that Locke himself devised.

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Why read it?

2 authors picked An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

M. Leona Godin

Author

This seventeenth-century offering is where the famous Molyneux Man first appears in the form of a question: If a man born blind and capable of distinguishing a cube from a sphere by touch, was suddenly made to see, would he be able to distinguish the two objects by sight alone? The answer was a resounding “no!” Just as we must learn to read, we must learn to see, gradually building up connections between our sense of touch and our sense of sight. This was a revelation to me when I encountered it as a person going blind and learning to…

From M.'s list on blindness and the brain.

Anna Wierzbicka

Author

I have just checked the index to my OUP 2006 book and I found that the number of references to John Locke (mostly, to his Essay) comes to 36. Apart from references to A.W., this beats everyone else; the next much quoted author being Shakespeare (27), and then, Cliff Goddard (18). As these figures illustrate, Locke’s Essay is in my view foundational for the study of meaning. One enormously important idea is developed in the following stunning passage:

“A moderate skill in different languages will easily satisfy one of the truth of this, it being so obvious to observe…

From Anna's list on meaning and language and why it matters.