•	turnitin 
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•	continued from last class: why the cogito isn’t an inference; the piece of wax example

Locke lecture
•	background: innate ideas (Plato, Descartes)

•	in general: Locke’s goal in the Essay – to avoid skepticism and dogmatism by discerning the nature and limits of human understanding. 
•	we need to begin all enquiry with an enquiry into our own understanding.  Otherwise, we “begin at the wrong end,” letting “loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being” before we have adequately prepared to (if adequate preparation for this is ever possible). 
•	“idea” = “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks...”, “whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking.”

•	No innate speculative principles.  Some of Locke’s arguments for this:
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1.	Why would God reduplicate his efforts in this way, giving us innate ideas, but also the power to receive those ideas adventitiously?  “...Any one will easily grant that it would be impertinent to suppose the ideas of colours innate in a creature to whom God hath given sight, and a power to receive them by the eyes from external objects”
2.	Even if all people had the same ideas, this wouldn’t prove that they were innate if there was another explanation for how they acquired these ideas.
3.	Even more damning for the argument from universal consent: there don’t seem to be any ideas which are universally agreed-upon.  The two usual candidates: “Whatsoever is, is” and “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.”  But, most people never even arrive at these maxims.  (Locke later points out that we understand particular empirical instances of these maxims, but not the abstract general ideas.  However, no one has ever claimed that we know the particular instances of these laws universally.)
4.	Children and idiots don’t have the least apprehension of those ideas that are said to be innate.
5.	Against the view that the capacity is innate even if the idea isn’t, Locke argues that surely we have the capacity to understand any idea that is true.  This renders all true ideas innate and the notion of innateness trivial.

•	How we actually get our ideas (according to Locke):		
•	the mind starts as a blank slate; it is experience alone that “writes” on this slate.
•	“The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish they yet empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names go to them.  Afterwards, the mind proceeding further, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.  In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty.  And the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials that give it employment increase.”		
•	All ideas are adventitious.  We receive simply ideas from the world via our senses.  
•	We can neither cause nor avoid/destroy these simple ideas, although we can recombine them into complex ideas ourselves.
•	Two kinds of simple ideas: ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection.
•	It is possible that there are more than five ways to sense the world, but we can’t imagine them.  There is a difference between what is possible for God and what is possible for human beings.

•	Reminder: names after bibliography on papers

•	Next class: Kant.