Charles Fleming
Instructor: Kurt Pond
PHI 111-002
4 August 2011
Banana
One of the best ways to look at Locke’s philosophy is to use a food item to analyze using Locke’s philosophy. A good food item to analyze is a peeled banana (and yes how gay am I). The reason is bananas are pretty consistent in size and quality, so that the banana I evaluate is pretty much the same banana you think of while reading the paper. Primary qualities are intrinsic properties. These are properties that exist weather we perceive them or not. You could say that they are the properties of Locke’s realism. The first one is the solidity of an object, sort of like bananas being soft with the softness being determined by how ripe the banana is. The bulk of an object is the next primary quality, such as the fact that a banana doesn’t take up a huge space. However the fact of it being longer then bulkier it does take up a decent length of space. The crescent moon shape of a banana is the figure quality of a banana. Bananas by themselves carry no motion. The quality of number is a changeable variable depending on how many bananas a person has, but in this evaluation I am evaluating one banana (minus the peel). Most of the original or primary qualities of body have to do with spatial-temporal patterning. “Nearly all the primary qualities which Locke lists are, in a broad sense, geometrical ones.” (Mackie) The easiest way to think of secondary qualities are the qualities of the senses or the “powers to produce” various sensations. For instance, we use our sight to tell that the banana (for the purpose we are using the perfect banana with no bruising) is a perfect cream color, remember this is a peeled banana. The secondary quality of sound we find with our hearing, hence another quality that depends on our senses for reality. The sound a banana makes when no force is excreted upon it I silence, while hardly any sound is produced with force applied is hardly anything. That is unless a lot of force is applied against the banana then it just goes SPLAT! Another sense that produces secondary qualities is the sense of touch. The interesting thing about the sense of touch is that it produces more than one secondary quality. For instance hard and soft, with my banana being soft but firm (remember we have the perfect banana). The sense of touch also gives us hot vs. cold, with my banana being warm temperature. Although fried bananas are really good, especially with brown sugar and cinnamon. Talking about the sense of taste, which I find the hardest to evaluate, we get such thing a sweet, salt, sour, etc. The reason I find the qualities of the tongue hard to evaluate I because like fingerprints, no two people have the same set of taste buds. To me the perfect banana is never sour, but really sweet and rich with a hint of sodium. According to J. L. Mackie in Problems From Locke,
“His [Locke] official definition of ‘idea’ is very wide: ‘whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks’. This could include real, external, independent things considered as objects of thought, and also, as Locke says what has been meant by such term as ‘phantasm’, ’notion’, and ‘species’ or what might now be called concept.”(Mackie) In other words, Locke split his complex idea about ideas into two categories. The first one was the simple idea, or the idea that only use one sense. Such examples would include the secondary qualities (all of which depend on only one sense) of color (sense: sight), temperature (touch), and firmness factor (touch) among others. Interestingly enough most of the primary qualities of an object, like the secondary ones, fall into the simple idea category. Some of these are shape, size, texture, motion/rest, and others. This is because they stay the same if left alone and are actual tangible objects. The actual tangible object of a peeled banana is a simple idea. When all the simple ideas are put together and we put a name (which