Blackwell Reference Online

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Metaphysics, epistemology For Plato an Idea was something objective, an intelligible archetype. The Christian Platonists replaced the archetypes with inborn memories, which they call innate ideas. The possession of these innate ideas and reflection upon them are necessary conditions for obtaining necessary truths. Locke rejected the existence of innate ideas, but accepted the assumption that the mind forms its picture of the world through ideas. He used the word “idea” widely and not very carefully. His various uses of this word in his works are hard to render consistent with one another. Sometimes he identified idea with perception. In this sense, ideas are what we are immediately aware of when we are perceiving things through senses or when in reflection we are introspectively aware of our own feelings and thoughts. Sometimes they are the copies of such sensory or introspective items in understanding. For Locke, ideas are the contents of thought or sensory experience, the thoughts we have about some object. This interchangeable use of idea and thought is also found in Hume. Sometimes ideas are objects, the immediate objects of the mind. Ideas, not physical objects, are what we immediately perceive. Ideas are also said to be the objects of memory and imagination. This account offers a kind of representative theory of perception. Sometimes ideas are even explained as qualities or ... log in or subscribe to read full text