Samuel Johnson was no systematic philosopher but, like many of the writers and thinkers of his age, he was inevitably engaged in discussions that make sense in a philosophical context. The questions that exercised eighteenth-century British philosophers – especially regarding the basis of our knowledge and the foundation of our moral sense – echoed throughout the culture as a whole. Two figures above all, John Locke and David Hume, provide a starting point for any discussion of philosophy in the eighteenth century.

Locke

John Locke published An Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690, and for the next hundred years this work provided the dominant framework in Britain for thinking about knowledge and the mind. This was true not only of intellectuals who read Locke’s work firsthand, but also of the more general readership: the principles of his thinking became the common currency of essays and of novels. Locke’s influence was great, but to speak only of influence may be misleading. Lockean thought was widely diffused and assimilated because it synthesized ways of thinking that meshed with the wider culture. Among these were the gradual erosion of religious certainties, the rise of scientific inquiry, the conception of society as an aggregate of individuals, and the wish to understand and accommodate conflicts of opinion rather than fighting them out.