International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research

Authors
Ijeoma Ene

Abstract
The fact is that philosophy is epistemology and epistemology is philosophy is not an overstatement. As a branch of philosophy, epistemology or theory of knowledge is mainly concerned with the nature, sources and scope of human knowledge. Much of the debate in this deal with the means of production of knowledge, and so, the issue of how knowledge is acquired being several millennia old had been tackled by many philosophers and one of them was John Locke, the first British empiricist and the father of empiricism. Contrary to the rationalists’ view, John Locke believes that there is nothing like innate ideas and following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics, he believes that there is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses. For him, all human ideas and knowledge derive from sense perception and reflection but the immediate objects of human knowledge are according to Locke, ideas. Since we have no direct knowledge of things themselves but only of ideas about them, the question is, how do we come about these ideas of things? For Locke in this regard, things impress or impose themselves on our minds, leaving in them their images or copies which for Locke are the immediate object of our knowledge are really the proper representation of things as to guarantee the certainty of our knowledge claims.