Tag Archives | John Locke

TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT

A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION

By John Locke
Read by Leighton Pugh
12 hours 50 minutes

John Locke (1632-1704) was a product of his troubled times: he lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution. His empirical thinking was very much directed at finding rational solutions to the root causes of those troubles. Considered the founder of English empiricism and a precursor of the enlightenment his ideas on religious toleration, human rights and limitations on governmental power may seem so normal to us now as to be common sense, so well have they been assimilated by the social psyche; but this was far from being the case when Locke proposed them. Continue Reading →

AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

By John Locke
Read by Leighton Pugh
30 hours 20 minutes

John Locke and his works – particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message – that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses – complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live. Continue Reading →