ipl-logo

John Locke's Concept Of Innate Knowledge

1226 Words5 Pages

Knowledge; It is something which we possess that contains everything which we know in this world. It is the collection of all our ideas about everything in existence since we are born. Just think of it as an empty jar and all our experiences are the things which you put inside it. As such, everything which is not placed inside the jar are those things which we don’t have any idea yet. As we grow older and mature enough, we eventually learn more things, and this is our way of letting those things from outside the jar to enter inside it. IDEAS VS SENSES According to the modern philosopher John Locke, knowledge has 2 sources: sensation and reflection. Sensation is the data perceived by our five senses. When we touch a cup of coffee, we gain …show more content…

Innate knowledge, as he explained, is the knowledge which we possessed starting from the day we are born. He believed that every people got their knowledge from birth, not from the experiences they had throughout their life, which contradicted Aristotle. Do you think our knowledge is inborn? It is hard to tell if all these ideas in our mind are ideas which we brought since our birth as if we never remembered anything when we were infants. We only had those ideas on how we acted when we were babies from our parents. It looks impossible that we originally have all the knowledge we have today since we are born and kept all of them in our minds. Does that mean that if I know how to solve Math problems today would mean that I really know how to do it even if I was still a little child? Perhaps Aristotle’s view is easier to believe because it is more realistic if we are to analyze it. We might have really gained our knowledge throughout the things which we experienced in our life. We might have been a blank paper at birth and as time passed by, everything we experience is written down on it permanently for us not to lose them and have knowledge about …show more content…

Most of us probably define reality as everything which exists and sensed. We believe that if something cannot be sensed, then it does not exist. But what if there are intangible things which are still in the scope of reality? Then our previous definition for it would be wrong. For some reason, there are two kinds of beings in this world; the material and the immaterial ones. Material beings are those which can be sensed. We see that the dog moved. Thus we can say that the dog is a material being. Immaterial beings on the other hand, includes the things which we cannot sense yet we believe that they are real because we are making use of them in our everyday lives such as our knowledge, emotions, our spirit and our soul. So if we are to say that existing=being sensed, then how come we believe that immaterial beings are existing? At some point, immaterial beings might not be totally immaterial because if we’re going to analyze it, material and immaterial should be opposite in a way that if material exists, then immaterial shouldn’t. They might just be material things which cannot be felt, heard, seen, smelled nor tasted. Maybe philosophers only used the word immaterial to be able to differentiate something with physical attributes to those who does not. Even if they have this difference, they have this one similarity: Both of them EXIST for a reason and they contribute to the totality of

Open Document