Senso, identità, libertà: Locke

To speak of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1632–1704) is to engage with one of the most influential texts in the landscape of Western philosophy. Regarded by many as the inaugural act of the British empiricist tradition (and of empiricist thought tout court) the Essay marks a decisive turning point in philosophical debate on the problem of knowledge, with long-lasting theoretical effects. Its fame was, moreover, already evident at the time of its publication in 1689, for reasons that are not difficult to identify. By theorizing the two sole sources of human knowledge as “the observations we make […] concerning external, sensible objects” and the “internal operations of our mind,” Locke’s text acts as a catalyst for various impulses toward theoretical renewal, increasingly oriented in an empirical and experimental direction, while at the same time promoting a move beyond cognitive apriorism in philosophy.