⇒ Libro An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke 9781406790276 Books

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke 9781406790276 Books

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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke 9781406790276 Books

I read Locke's Two Treatises of Government in the late 1970s or even earlier. I wanted to know how our government became so unwieldy and I needed something to contrast it with. Locke came well recommended. I didn't know about his book on understanding or I would have read it then, too. In those days, the lines drawn between liberty and progressivism or socialism were not drawn as clearly. I needed to be able to check the thinking and logic of others around me and in fact, more precisely, my own. To this end I read books on logic, like Jevons and Bacon. I bought this book to round out my library and further my understanding of my fellow Americans. To understand how we come to understand can be an important factor in our relations with other people.


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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke 9781406790276 Books Reviews

This book is a required read for most philosophy programs across the country for both undergraduate and graduate studies. If you're not in a college class where you can find other minds to chew this with I would recommend reading journal articles or other writings from philosophers that responded in some way to the premise this author is putting forth.
Pleased with my purchase
This must be a very good book because it's very famous and very long. The best bit of this book is the chapter on infinity, I think. (Pages 145-155.) But it has no editorial introduction to give the book context, and the syntax is tricky to understand unless you're familiar with regional British English. It's long-winded and repetitive, and the subject matter is of no great consequence.

The infinity chapter gives an excellent explanation of the issues surrounding infinity-related concepts. It's highly relevant to mathematicians who might want to understand why there's any difficulty. Nowadays, mathematics is full of infinities, without philosophical discussion. In Locke's day, this subject was still controversial.

Concerning the lack of editorial introduction, there isn't even a basic outline of the publication history. So I don't know which edition this is. Apparently Locke's "Essay concerning human understanding" was first outlined in a 1688 publication. (See page xvii.) Then one other source (not this book) tells me that there were 4 editions in Locke's lifetime, the first two being in 1689 and 1694. Another source says 1690, 1694, 1695 and 1700. But page 15 of this book mentions a ninth edition, upon which this publication is apparently based. On page xx, the author's foreword states that this is the 6th edition. So it's anyone's guess whether this is an edition which Locke saw, or whether it is some later adaptation.

The date of publication matters because one naturally wishes to compare the ideas in a book with the ideas in other books around that time, to evaluate influences etc. This book was written in the time of Boyle and Newton. (See page xvi.)

If you're not a native speaker of British English, with some familiarity with regional variations in sentence structure, you might have difficulties with this book. Often the conjunctions or prepositions are omitted, as one might do in regional spoken English. Very often, I had to re-read sentences to determine where the clauses started and ended. This makes the reading a little tiring.

The text is interspersed with some kind of a flame-war with some trolling Bishop who seemed to know nothing about Locke's subject. These pointless responses to pointless open letters are not a really good use of paper. The author must have been very rich to afford to include so much waffle along with the main text.

All in all, I think this is the kind of book you really should buy and put on your shelf for historical reasons. I wouldn't recommend actually reading it. It's a big book at a low price. A real bargain!
My purpose in purchasing this book was to read the full text as John Lock wrote it. Most of the texts popularly available are abridgements. However, a down side to the text is that it does not include a table of contents and the chapter headings, which most of the abridgements do. In any case, this book is one of the most important in modern philosophy, representing the English tradition of modesty in what human beings can know. Of course, it is empiricism at its best as well as at its worst. Yet, his clear objective is to get everyone to have more modesty in their beliefs, and therefore, they will be more tolerant of the beliefs of others. In our ideological age, these are good reminders.
Beautiful! I read and finished Mr. Locke's book, and can't help but feel him a great friend. I invested much time in learning his philosophy that by the time I was done with his book, I could not help but feel a bit melancholy. You will learn much from this book, and will gain even more from daily contemplation! The book itself is not worth buying in hardcover, but I give it five stars because I just love this book that much.
This book is where John Locke laid down his "Tabula Rasa" and this ideology has carried on through centuries (and even up to today for those who aren't educated enough to know he's actually been proven wrong. In fact most modern philosophers have been proven wrong on most of the things they wrote). Nonetheless, this is a great book and an interesting read. There are four "books" within this book and each chapter has a lot of rich information. It's a very dense text with Locke covering a lot throughout. This is (arguably) one of the top influential philosophical texts that has been written and it's studied in modern philosophy courses at my university. I would recommend this book to anyone that's a novice to philosophy.
Large margins for notes, however highlighted ink bleeds right through. The cover tears very easily, as do the pages. However, this was a perfect copy for a highschool history class.
I read Locke's Two Treatises of Government in the late 1970s or even earlier. I wanted to know how our government became so unwieldy and I needed something to contrast it with. Locke came well recommended. I didn't know about his book on understanding or I would have read it then, too. In those days, the lines drawn between liberty and progressivism or socialism were not drawn as clearly. I needed to be able to check the thinking and logic of others around me and in fact, more precisely, my own. To this end I read books on logic, like Jevons and Bacon. I bought this book to round out my library and further my understanding of my fellow Americans. To understand how we come to understand can be an important factor in our relations with other people.