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Glite Dictionary
📚 English philosopher 📺 TV character
John Locke

John Locke

4 5.5
An English thinker in the 1600s who studied how people know things and how governments should work
  • proper noun
  • /dʒɑn lɑk/
: John Locke
  • But the framers of the Constitution were well aware of John Locke's warning against delegation of legislative power.
  • John Locke's Treatise
  • John Locke, the philosopher

You know, for example, Rene Descartes, Nikolai Malbrosch, you know, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, all of these people as well.

Examples

  • Over two millennia passed before seventeenth-century Englishman John Locke introduced experiential education (the idea that one learns through experience).

    Academic text (2003)

  • John Locke's Treatise of Government seems more serious about assuring that individuals retain their rights.

    Academic text (2003)

  • John Locke believed that the only way an individual can learn is through experience.

    Academic text (2003)

  • John Locke believed that self-preservation and the preservation of other humans were the primary values that law should seek to affect.

    Academic text (2016)

  • In the realm of political thinking, we find the philosopher John Locke relating a theory about government that was based on natural laws as opposed to arbitrary authority.

    Academic text (1996)

  • Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and St. George Tucker, like John Locke before them, all believed that property was a cornerstone of a free society.

    Academic text (2016)

  • Swinburne apparently imagines a state of nature similar to that described by John Locke, in which individuals hold an exclusive right to punish those who harm them.

    Academic text (2003)

  • John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill are among the liberal tradition's leading spokesmen.

    Academic text (1996)

  • A fuller discussion came much later in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1651) and, especially, John Locke (1690) - often said to be the philosophical father of America.

    Academic text (2018)

  • The ideas of John Locke laid the foundation for modern democratic thought.

Surface Forms

John Locke main

Morphology

John + Locke

This is a proper name referring to a specific fictional character, so knowing the constituent words 'John' and 'Locke' (common given name and surname) does not allow a learner to infer the character's identity or attributes. Proper names are arbitrary referents rather than compositional expressions, so the meaning is not derivable from the parts.

Etymology

John Locke was a 17th-century English thinker who said our minds begin like a blank page and are filled by 'experience'. This image — a blank sheet slowly written by life — helps remember his main idea that knowledge comes from learning through experience.