An Essay Concerning Human Understanding By John Locke

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John Locke a popular philosopher of his area wrote a piece called “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” With this piece he attempts to clarify the origin of ideas, what ideas are, the mind develops ideas and how our ideas allow us to acquire knowledge. Locke demonstrates his opposition on the widely accepted theory of innate ideas and knowledge from Plato, by arguing that ideas and knowledge are not innate.
Although Locke admires Plato, he opposes Plato’s theory of forms in the sense of ideas. In simple terms, Plato believed that a god or a creator thought of absolutely everything and everything that this creator thought of was original and in its purest form (to Plato this is considered the “real” world); therefore the human soul is a form that obtains all knowledge and all ideas but when it pertains to a body and the body is born all knowledge and all ideas are blurred. One must live their life clearing their minds of confusion from the material world in order to recollect the knowledge and ideas they once obtained, meaning the all knowledge and ideas are innate because they ...

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