Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapters I-XI (pp. 33-66)

1. According to Locke, all "the materials of knowledge" come from "experience" (Chapter I, pp. 16-22).
  a) Explain the two sources which constitute "experience" for him (Sections 2-4)?
  b) Give examples of ideas of each kind.
  c) Which of the two kinds of ideas arise last in the mind (Section 8)? Why?

2. a) What is Locke's view of the essence of the soul? Does he agree with Descartes that the essence of the soul is to think (Chapter I, Section 10; compare Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 3, p. 203)?
b) What is his answer to the question of when the soul enters the body?
c) Suppose that when I am asleep my soul has a whole set of experiences that I have no consciousness of when I am awake. Suppose the set of sleep experiences is consistent with itself but has no connection with our waking consciousness. What conclusion does Locke then draw with regard to the soul, man and person (Sections 11-12)?

3. How do we get our idea of solidity according to Locke (Chapter IV), and how does he use it to distinguish extension from body (Section 5)? Note his opposition to the Cartesian idea that body is defined  simply by extension.

4. Chapter VIII (p. 47), “Other Considerations Concerning Simple Ideas”
a) Look at section 8 pp. 48-9. Explain his distinction between an idea and a quality. Where is the idea and where is the quality? What exactly is a quality?
b) What is a primary quality, according to what he says in section 9? How does he determine what constitutes a primary quality of body? Is is method the same or different from that which we found in Galileo?
c) What is a secondary quality, according to section 10? What kind of primary qualities are they related to? Are secondary qualities in objects? (Are they really qualities, according to the way you found Locke defining a quality in section 8?)
d) In section 12 Locke gives a similar account to Descartes as to how we come to have ideas of primary qualities. What is Locke's account? What are the important features of it?
e) How does he think we come to have the ideas of secondary qualities? (Section 13)
f) How does Locke describe the difference between the primary and secondary qualities in section 15? What is sweetness or warmness or color as it exists in the objects themselves?
g). How does he argue for this difference in section 16, using the sensation of pain?
h) What is the characteristic of "real qualities" according to section 17? From what he says here, do you think he considers secondary qualities to be real? (Check back to sections 10 and 8 to be sure that you are clear about what a secondary quality is.)

 5. In Chapter IX, Section 8 Locke considers states that "the ideas we receive by sensation, are often in grown people altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it."
a) Explain in your own terms, by means of an example what he means.
b) What is the question which was put forward by Locke's friend Mr. Molyneux? What is the answer, according to Molyneux and what is its significance for our more general understanding of the process of perception?

 6. In Chapters X (see Section 10) and XI (Sections 9-11), Locke discusses the question of whether non-human animals are machines. His view is opposed to that of Descartes in Discourse 5. In the course of the discussion he also makes very important remarks on abstraction —a topic which becomes very important when we look at Berkeley and Hume.
a) Why does Locke reject the Cartesian view that brute (non-human) animals are mere automatic machines in Chapter X, Section 10?these questions.)
b) What exactly is Locke=s account of abstraction in Chapter XI, Sections 9-10? How do we arrive at abstract ideas?
c) How exactly does he distinguish brute animals from humans in Chapter XI, Section 11?