John Locke
By Natasha Collins
John Locke
He was born In 1632 at wrinton in somerset .
John locke
The son of a Puritan attorney, he was educated by Puritans at Westminster and studied mathematics and medicine at Christ Church College at Oxford, still a bastion of Royalist sympathies. He held various academic posts there, and became physician and confidential adviser to the Whig first earl of Shaftesbury, in whose house he came to live in 1667. He held a number of official positions until he was expelled from England in 1684 for supposed complicity in Shaftesbury's plots. He then traveled in France and took up residence in Holland, where he came to the attention of the then Prince of Orange, who would shortly become William III. After William had assumed the throne of England Locke came back into favor, and became commisioner of appeals, an adviser on coinage, and a member of the council of trade.His two Treatises on Govemment, written in 1679 and 1680, but too radical (and too dangerous) to be published then, finally appeared in 1690, and were employed to justify the Glorious Revolution by denying the validity of the theory of the divine right of kings. Locke's ideas contradicted the more conservative assumptions which had been put forth by Hobbes in his Leviathan, and they became the classic defenses of the political ideals of many seventeenth-century Englishmen: the origins of the state, Locke maintained, lay in a social contract between the people and their government, and the people were within their rights to remove or alter a government which betrayed their trust. Revolution, then, became the ultimate recourse (and a legitimate one) of a people whom tyranny had deprived of their rights. By the eighteenth century, Locke's theories had become as orthodox in British philosophical circles as his friend Newton's had become in physics: both were advocates of different sorts of natural laws which assumed that the universe functioned in a systematic fashion.Locke remained a Christian, maintaining that since our minds are not capable of comprehending reality, we must supplement our knowledge with faith: he was also a strong advocate of religious liberty, writing four letters on the principle of religious toleration. He died in 1704 and was buried at High Laver in Essex.
John Locke Biography