Viacheslav Zahorodniuk
Biruté Ciplijauskaité Postdoctoral Fellow (2023–2025)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto; Assistant of the Chair of Philosophy and Methodology of Science, Department of Philosophy, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception
Some Thoughts Concerning Education is the most popular reference regarding the topic of childhood in John Locke’s theory. In this influential book, he guides teachers on how to shape a person’s mind to make them a proper member of society. However, Locke’s interest in children is not limited to educational purposes—he frequently addresses this topic in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for various reasons. In part I, he mainly uses children’s minds in his famous charge against innatism—he claims that no innate ideas are present before birth. In Book 2, Locke focuses on his theory and explains how the child gradually develops ideas from experience. However, his writings on children in An Essay are unsystematic and scattered across the text. Therefore, the first challenge is to reconstruct the whole picture of his views on children’s development. After that, I will trace the progress of the mind from the embryo stage to the stage when a child becomes a person capable of education. This project is intended to bring a new perspective on the topic of childhood in Locke—I will show how it is crucial for his theory not only from an educational perspective but also from epistemological and even metaphysical.
Viacheslav Zahorodniuk was an assistant professor in Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He defended his PhD thesis “The evolution of the ‘idea’ concept in the British philosophy of 17-18th century” devoted to Locke’s, Berkeley’s and Hume’s epistemology. For the last year, Zahorodniuk was working as a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto under the supervision of professor Donald C. Ainslie. His project was on Hume’s theory of early children development. His main interests are the history of early modern philosophy and epistemology.
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