During the glorious revolution of England from 65438 to 0688, a philosopher who had a far-reaching influence on the whole capitalist world was born. He is John Locke. He is a lucky man, because few people are like him, and the present revolution completely conforms to the spirit of his own theory. After this revolution, "Britain still doesn't feel the need for any revolution." Locke's philosophy has a wide range of contents, and Russell summarized two aspects, one is epistemology and the other is political philosophy. His masterpiece The Theory of Human Rationality covers his epistemology, and his empiricism is very bold and thorough. From Descartes to Leibniz, it is said that much of our knowledge does not come from experience, but he believes that "all our knowledge is rooted in experience, and knowledge comes from experience in the final analysis". This view sounds more acceptable to modern people and closer to the materialistic attitude. Interestingly, however, Locke's descendants followed his empiricism to subjectivism and skepticism. It goes without saying that empiricism, as a philosophical school, was opposed to idealism in later Germany. I think Locke's more important significance lies in his moral and political philosophy and his spiritual temperament consistent with his epistemology. Locke's philosophy gives people the impression of optimism, humility and tolerance. From his empiricism, we can see that "the degree of consent given to him depends on the possible evidence to support it"; Some of Locke's moral principles can be regarded as the pioneer of Bentham. He believes that human beings are driven by the desire to pursue happiness. Based on this, it is logical to put forward the views on natural law, social contract, private property, restriction and balance in political philosophy. These ideas have been quite mature, and later they were introduced to France, and after some supplementary perfection, they have now penetrated into the bone marrow of American society. It should be noted that Locke's morality cannot be equated with hedonism. One of his most important constraints is that people should act according to reason, which can remind us of Spinoza.
After Locke, Becquerel, one of his two important followers, transformed his empiricism into subjective idealism. He denied the existence of matter by arguing with two people named Feronos and Geras. For things that exist objectively, Becker always tries to cancel them. For example, Heiles thinks that there is a house that no one perceives and is not in anyone's mind. Feronos retorted: This house is in Heiles's heart. Russell's defense of Hellas is very interesting: the number of times two integers are multiplied is infinite, and several (actually countless) have never been thought of, but they do exist.
Another Locke's successor is david hume. Russell described Hume, and empiricism finally reached a "dead end"-"it is impossible to move in his direction". "Refuting him has always been a fashionable pastime of metaphysics." "In my opinion, I don't think their refutation is convincing enough." He denied that causality is the thought of logical reasoning, but it was classified as something of experience, that is, "because of A, the result is B". It is not that A has the power to produce B, but the experience about the connection between A and B events (often connected) prompted us to say "because of A, the result is B". Hume also takes "belief" as an example, and thinks that belief is "a distinct concept related to or combined with current impression". In this way, he naturally demonstrated that the repeated connection between A and B is not the reason to expect them to be connected in the future, which is similar to the simple enumeration and induction discussed in Bacon's section. Skepticism is based on the complete negation of inductive principle and ends empiricism. Refuting Hume has been proved by the failure of later scholars. Although Hume's philosophy is a "bad" philosophy, it is hard to refute that skepticism is a good medicine for some credulous people.