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Overview
Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written by English philosopher John Locke and published in 1689—at a time of intense political and philosophical unrest in Britain
. Locke’s essay was the first systematic presentation of an empiricist philosophy of mind and cognition: a theory of knowledge and belief based wholly on the principle that everything in our mind gets there by way of experience.Locke’s meticulous, but rational empiricism offered an alternative and enticing view of the world and our access to it from the dominant warring philosophical camps of the time—the Aristotelian Scholastics and the upstart Cartesian rationalists.
Read the overall summary, explanations of important quotes, and essays about historical and philosophical context for the publication of Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Or, learn more by studying SparkNotes guides to other works by John Locke.
