“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” - Bertrand Russell

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SECTION II: What is the Self?

Reading 4: from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding

In our fourth reading on the topic of the human self, John Locke undertakes an empiricist's investigation of the self, revealing features similar to but also different from those found by the rationalist, Descartes.

Click Here for the Reading File in .pdf format.

 

"We must consider what person stands for;—which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive."



 

Locke Portrait

John Locke by Godfrey Kneller, 1697

 

 

Go on to the next reading, Hume's Treatise.

Go back to Descartes's Meditations.