John locke main ideas

The English philosopher and political theorist John Locke laid much of the groundwork for the Enlightenment and made central contributions to the development of liberalism. Trained in medicine, he was a key advocate of the empirical approaches of the Scientific Revolution. His essays on religious tolerance provided an early model for the separation of church and state.

Where did john locke live

John Locke was born in in Wrighton, Somerset. His father was a lawyer and small landowner who had fought on the Parliamentarian side during the English Civil Wars of the s. Using his wartime connections, he placed his son in the elite Westminster School. Did you know? Between and , John Locke was a student and then lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, where he focused on the standard curriculum of logic, metaphysics and classics.

He also studied medicine extensively and was an associate of Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and other leading Oxford scientists. When that failed, Shaftesbury began to plot armed resistance and was forced to flee to Holland in Locke would follow his patron into exile a year later, returning only after the Glorious Revolution had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.

During his decades of service to Shaftesbury, John Locke had been writing. In the six years following his return to England he published all of his most significant works. To discover truths beyond the realm of basic experience, Locke suggested an approach modeled on the rigorous methods of experimental science, and this approach greatly impacted the Scientific Revolution.

Rejecting the divine right of kings, Locke said that societies form governments by mutual and, in later generations, tacit agreement. Thus, when a king loses the consent of the governed, a society may remove him—an approach quoted almost verbatim in Thomas Jefferson 's Declaration of Independence.