John Locke. Ideas and reasoning ability
John Locke was born in Wrington in 1632. After graduating from Oxford in 1656, he stayed at the university and subsequently chose the profession of a physician. A fortunate confluence of circumstances allowed him to move to London in 1667 and become the personal physician and secretary of the Earl of Shaftesbury, a member of the government, the leader of the Whig party in parliament, which, in turn, opened up a wide field for Locke to work in the field of public service, to participate in politics and scientific activities – Locke became an active member of the Royal Society, the English Academy of Sciences. Shaftesbury’s transition to open opposition to the king and his subsequent death forced Locke to emigrate to Holland in 1683. In Holland, Locke completed work on his main philosophical work, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and published it in England in 1690, after his return. At the same time, he anonymously published Two Treatises on Government, containing his political philosophy, and An Epistle on Toleration, which he had been working on in the preceding years. Later, he wrote Thoughts on Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). Locke died in 1704.
Thomas Hobbes. About the Citizen and Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 in Malmesbury to a local priest. After graduating from a provincial school, he managed to enter Oxford University and then get a job as a tutor in a family of English aristocrats. This allowed him not only to move in aristocratic circles, but also to travel with his students around France and Italy, to become acquainted with the latest achievements of European science. Hobbes assessed the English Revolution as a grave social disaster and, with the onset of revolutionary unrest, moved to Paris, where he lived for about 11 years (1640-1651). In France, he developed his political philosophy and set it out initially in his work “On the Citizen” (1642), and later in his main work “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of the State, Ecclesiastical and Civil” (1651). When Cromwell invited him back, Hobbes returned to England, but he never found common ground with his compatriots, who were divided into two warring camps; his works “On the Citizen” and “Leviathan” were included in the index of prohibited books. Nevertheless, the thinker continued to develop his philosophical concept. Over the course of several years, he published two works – “On the Body” (1655) and “On Man” (1658), which, together with the previously written doctrine “on the citizen”, formed three parts of “The Principles of Philosophy”, presenting his views as a complete system. Hobbes died in 1679.