Locke's Legacy

Question 1

Locke’s Legacy

Dramatic changes include:

Answer 1

• The development of a public sphere( An extra-political space that facilitated the exchange of ideas & the formation of consensus)
• A new & rapidly expanding reading public, w/ new literary genres to accommodate its tastes (The commercialization of literature, ‘leisure’ as a commodity)
• New science, new ways of seeing the world (Newton & Locke, ‘the laws of nature’ & empiricism)

Question 2

Locke’s Legacy

Changes lead to:

Answer 2

A new & rapidly expanding reading public, w/ new literary genres to accommodate its tastes (The commercialization of literature, ‘leisure’ as a commodity)
- New science, new ways of seeing the world (Newton & Locke, ‘the laws of nature’ & empiricism)

Question 3

Locke’s Legacy

How did Locke influence the eighteenth-century?

Answer 3

• Science
• Philosophy
• Religion
• Art (the novel)

Question 4

Locke’s Legacy

Locke & Gender

Answer 4

• Lockean philosophy provides a powerful basis for arguing for access to education for women.
• ‘No innate ideas’ suggests no man/woman is born with knowledge, but rather that each person acquires it through experience.
• All have the same faculties—the senses & the power to reflect on sensory data—required to gather knowledge.
• Women’s ‘defects’ not a result of design (‘nature’), but rather of culture & prejudice (‘nurture’)

Question 5

Locke’s Legacy

Locke & Religion

Answer 5

• Powerful argument for ‘rational religion’, the various forms of deistic thought that run through eighteenth-century culture (Pope, “Essay on Man”)
• We can ‘reason upwards’ to God
• God can be inferred through reflection upon the sensory data

Question 6

Locke’s Legacy

Locke & Skepticism

Answer 6

• Fueled a number of the philosophers of the Enlightenment
• The existence of that which cannot be known/confirmed through the senses, Hume concludes, is dubious
• Demands sensory data to legitimize claims (Hume): “it is experience only which gives authority to human testimony” (185)

Question 7

Locke’s Legacy

The novel

Answer 7

• Emerging as a form in the late seventeenth & early eighteenth centuries
• “Novel” a term of derision; ‘a novelty,’ associated with things new, fashionable, temporary, ephemeral
• Earlier models: memoirs, auto/biographies, journalistic accounts
• Eighteenth century = a period of remarkable experimentation with the form
• The form remains inchoate, developing in the period
• Also remains a somewhat suspect form, lacks the ‘literary authority’ of poetry or drama
• The novel’s ‘triumph’ or ‘coming of age’ is a Romantic-era affair (Walter Scott) (Ina Ferris)