Memory can fail or mislead
If memory carries identity, forgotten acts and false memories create difficult cases for responsibility.
Early modern philosophy · 1632–1704
John Locke
Locke connects knowledge to experience, political authority to consent and personal identity to continuity of consciousness.
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician whose work became central to empiricism and liberal political thought. He wrote influential accounts of ideas, personal identity, toleration, property and legitimate government.
KnowledgeMindJustice
The question he enters
The question John Locke enters
What makes a person today answerable for a past action if body, memory and character can all change?
The central move
Ask what experience can justify—and what power must answer to
Locke rejects innate ideas and investigates how experience supplies the materials of thought. The same anti-authoritarian pressure shapes his politics: legitimate rule must be justified to free and equal persons rather than inherited as natural mastery. His account of personal identity moves the person away from a fixed substance and towards consciousness across time.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Empiricism
- The view that the materials of human knowledge arise from experience rather than arriving as innate principles.
- Natural rights
- Moral claims individuals possess prior to and against political authority.
- Consent
- A central condition in Locke's account of legitimate government and political obligation.
- Continuity of consciousness
- Personal identity follows connected awareness and responsibility rather than simply sameness of body or soul.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
The exclusions matter
Locke's language of equality and toleration sits beside historical exclusions and entanglements that limit any uncomplicated celebration.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
- Project GutenbergAn Essay Concerning Human UnderstandingWebIdeas, knowledge, language and personal identity.Project Gutenberg Volume 1, based on the 1690 second edition, Books I and II; original English text. · Readable online with downloadable ebook formats from the catalogue page. Checked Aug 2026.
- Cambridge AspireTwo Treatises of GovernmentWebNatural rights, consent, property and political legitimacy.Edited by Peter Laslett, revised Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, 1988, 478 pages; DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511810268. · Official complete-edition record listing both the First and Second Treatises, with institutional access options. Checked Aug 2026.
- Online Library of LibertyA Letter Concerning TolerationWeb · PDF · EPUBThe limits of coercion in matters of belief and worship.In A Letter concerning Toleration and Other Writings, edited by Mark Goldie, Liberty Fund, 2010; based on the corrected second English edition of 1690. · Free full web reading plus repository-generated PDF and EPUB downloads from the title page. Checked Aug 2026.
On this site
Continue in a usable resource.
What makes you the same person over time?RelevantInquiry · Consciousness, memory and the prince-and-cobbler case.ToleranceRelevantUnit · Religious disagreement and the limits of civil power.The Ship of TheseusRelevantGame · Compare material continuity with psychological continuity.Philosophy ProfileAppears hereGame · Put empiricism and psychological continuity under pressure.