New Concepts, New Roads

The idea" is one of the most frequently occurring terminologies in Locke's Essays on Human Understanding. It is also the key to construing Locke's philosophy correctly insofar as it bears and epitomizes the basic tenets of Locke's philosophic ontology and epistemology. On the other hand, the new elements that Locke injects into the conventional theory of idea are virtually prefatory to the Enlightenment Movement and thereby occupy a significant position in the entire history of philosophical development. But domestically, most researchers are merely concerned with the object properties reflected by Locke's object property and with the empirical tendencies suggested in Lock's theory of idea. Or they are just confined to interpreting Locke from the single perspective of Hegel's system of philosophy. No sufficient attention has been paid to the unique ideologies connoted in Lock's theory of idea, nor has there been any discussion on the vital role played by Locke's theory of idea in the Enlightenment Movement. It is therefore the intention of this dissertation to offer a fresh perspective from which the uniqueness of Locke's ideology is to be examined in the light of the theory of idea.Locke's theory of idea inherits tradition from the Platonic theory of idea, but at the same time it absorbs all the novel elements that had emerged in the western philosophies of the modern period just prior to Locke under the converging influence of Descartism and Bacon-Horbus's empiricism. A retrospective look at the two-millennium history of western philosophy would clearly reveal that Locke's theory of idea is traceable to Plato's theory, that it is a further extension of the traditional thinking in this connection, and that it largely expands in an easily understandable way the social influence of such progressive elements as humanism, rationality and freedom that are all important notions in the modern ideological development since the Renaissance.A threefold significance is found with the term of the " idea" in Locke's Essays on Human Understanding: l.The "idea" as a mental entity, 2. as a medium and 3.