John Locke

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John Locke was born on August 29, 1632 the son of a country attorney and. Locke grew up in and during the civil war. In 1652, he entered the Christ Church (Oxford) where he remained as a student and teacher for many years. Locke taught and lectured in Greek, rhetoric, and Moral philosophy. Locke, after reading works of Descartes, developed a strong interest in contemporary philosophical and scientific questions and theories.
In 1666, Locke met Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, and from then on, this lifelong relationship and association helped to change the course of Locke’s career. Cooper made Locke his personal secretary and confidential adviser. In 1675, Locke became very ill and was forced to leave his employment and reside for four years in France, where he began his writing. After four years, Locke then returned again to England where he once again joined Cooper’s service. Four years later, Cooper was forced to flee to Holland, shortly after Locke followed him. They remained there until the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
On his return to England, Locke published several works, the chief of these being the Two Treaties of Government, and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. These writings were eventually successful and both exerted a vast influence when the American revolution began in the seventeen hundreds. These works became part of English and American thought through the greater part of the eighteenth century.
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) became a well-known writing. Locke attacked the theory of diving right of kings and the nature of the state as conceived by the English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes. He did not believe that a king should become king because ‘God told him to be,’ but rather...

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...contract. Locke’s ideas are close to my own, either because I have been taught them or after learning them I just agree I don’t know. I do know that I am moved to argue many of the same points that he would argue and I feel them deeply.

Works Cited

Uzgalis, William. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010. Accessed Dec 1, 2013.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration Routledge, New York, 1991. p. 5 (Introduction)
Locke, John (2009), Two Treatises on Government: A Translation Into Modern English, Industrial Systems Research, p. 81, ISBN 978-0-906321-47-8
Dunn, John (1969), The Political Thought of John Locke: A Historical Account of the Argument of the 'Two Treatises of Government', Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 99, "[The Two Treatises of Government are] saturated with Christian assumptions."

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