CONCEPTUAL DOMINANTS OF JOHN LOCKE'S MORAL TERMINOLOGY. PART I
In: Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta: naučnyj žurnal = Moscow State University bulletin. Serija 9, Filologija, Heft №5, 2023, S. 57-72
The article provides the reconstruction of the English terminological
system of morality and its language features in one of the most famous papers of
John Locke An Essay Сoncerning Human Understanding (1689). We study this
philosophical paper within the framework of cognitive and discursive paradigm of
linguistic knowledge and aim to investigate the ideas about human nature and the
principles behind the work of human mind. Laws and principles were formulated
by the scholar on the basis of nature determination in human thinking and ideas
appearance in individual psychological system. The article investigates in detail
conceptual dominants of the moral philosophy and terminology in Locke's paper
and, besides that, key metaphors in Locke's discourse used for the description of
human thinking including tabula rasa, empty cabinet, fountains of knowledge,
knowledge is light. On the one hand, these conceptual metaphors are deeply rooted
in the historical and philosophical context, and on the other, they were understandable to his contemporaries, as he used recognizable words and images. Locke not
only changes the actual linguistic representation of some of the traditional philosophical metaphors, but shifts the emphasis, leading to novel interpretations and
complicating the system of ideas as a whole. To understand main components of the
philosopher's framework we took into account earlier papers of various scholars as
the material for comparison. These components include the process by which new
types of knowledge are formed and pathways by which the already existing types
are recategorized under the impact of sociocultural factors. It was shown that the
system of morality is grounded on the 17th-century views on how the human mind
works and embodies the language representation of terminological sphere of morality.