John Locke dishes out the schoolin'

Mental Hercules, John Locke, starts his Essay on Human Understanding by acknowledging that publishing it got some people pretty cross.

"I have been told that a short Epitome of this volume was condemned by some without reading"

he says, which is something Philosophers have to get used to I suppose. Then he gets into the good stuff, viz. the actual meat of his disagreement with some other Enlightenment dudes. And the meat is BEEF.

Here's how you throw down 18th century style:

"My meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be every where rightly understood."

Absolute mayhem.

Locke is from the oratorical school of acting like a perfect gentleman without giving an inch. It works out pretty well for him because

A) He's John Locke
and
B) The other guy isn't.

Let's see how it plays out ESPN style: slow motion, crunching tackles, big scores.

"Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. "

Oh no you better not have did!

"For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, "

Did John Locke just praise you in print? You're toast. It's like watching a cat play with a mouse. I can't watch.

"as if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning;"

Translation: I am going to give you one chance to take that back and then it's CLOBBERIN' TIME!

" which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following."

LOCKE SMASH! DID YOU EVEN READ IT!? DID. YOU. EVEN. READ. IT???

So there's that. What I would like to say is look how polite he is. Did he even call him a liar or a retard?  He did not. He was just like "Surely I must have misunderstood, you can't actually mean what you said?"

Textbook Principle of Charity. Try and put the best spin on it you can, do anything possible to save the grace and civil standing of your opponent.

What a chieftain!