John Locke

John Locke (English: John Locke, August 29, 1632 - October 28, 1704, FRS), a famous British philosopher, one of the most influential Enlightenment philosophers, and is widely described as the father of liberalism. In the theory of knowledge, Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume are listed as representatives of British empiricism. Locke also made important contributions to the theory of social contract. He developed a theory that was different from Thomas Hobbes's state of nature, arguing that government could only be justified if it obtained the consent of the governed and guaranteed the people's natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke believed that a social contract could only be established with the consent of the governed, and in the absence of such consent, the people had the right to overthrow the government. John Locke divided state power into legislative power, executive power and external power, and advocated the separation of legislative power and executive power, and the unification of administrative power and external power; legislative power is the highest power of the country. Locke's ideas had a huge impact on the development of political philosophy in later generations, and he is widely regarded as the most influential thinker and liberal during the Enlightenment era. His writings also greatly influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. The American Declaration of Independence was also influenced by his classical republican and liberal ideas. Locke's theory of spiritual philosophy is generally regarded as the founder of "ontology" and self-theory in modernism, and also influenced the later works of David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the concept of self in terms of continuous "consciousness". He also proposed the hypothesis that the mind is a "blank slate". Unlike Descartes or Christian philosophy, Locke believed that humans are born without any memory or thought.