Locke and Other Philosophers

Although Henry Lee is often recognized to be an important early critic of Locke's 'way of ideas', his Anti-Scepticism (1702) has hardly received the scholarly attention it deserves. This paper seeks to fill that lacuna. It argues that Lee's criticism of Locke's alleged representationalism was original, and that it was quite different from the more familiar kind of criticism that was launched against Locke's theory of ideas by such thinkers as John Sergeant and Thomas Reid. In addition, the paper offers (...) an interpretation of Lee’s claim that, pace Locke, attempts to prove the veridicality of our cognitive apparatus are fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the transition in the seventeenth century from the outmoded hylomorphist empiricism espoused by the Scholastic Aristotelians to the atomistic empiricism embraced by such 'new' philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and John Locke. I focus on the philosophical writings of a British reformer of Aristotle, John Sergeant, who opposed the Cartesians and wrote a commentary on Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding called Solid Philosophy Asserted Against the Fancies of the Ideists. Given the well-documented problems (...) that have arisen out of modern empiricism, it would be interesting to take a more careful look at the critical juncture between the 'old' and 'new' forms of empiricism to see if the former might have had in it the seeds of a viable alternative to the latter. ;I consider Sergeant's views on scientific knowledge and methodology, the relationship between sense and intellect in perception, the nature of the self and self-knowledge, and the nature of substance, substantial change, and the individuation and identity of substances. With regard to each of these, I first consider his views, where appropriate, in relation to the Scholastic Aristotelians St. Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez, in order to see which aspects of Scholastic philosophy he discarded and which aspects he chose to retain as compatible with seventeenth-century scientific developments. Then, I examine Sergeant's relationship to Descartes and some of his contemporaries in the new empiricist tradition, such as Hobbes, Gassendi, and Locke, in order to see how well Sergeant understands the moderns, whether he finds any interesting philosophical problems arising out of modern empiricism, and whether he is able to retain what was valuable in Aristotelianism, apart from its discredited scientific framework, or whether his exposure to and acceptance of certain modern doctrines might have subverted his Aristotelianism to the point that it could be of little value as an alternative to the new empiricism. (shrink)

While the roots of modern German sociology are often traced back to historicism, the importance of rational natural law in the inception of the founding work of German sociology, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft by Ferdinand Tönnies, intended as a ?creative synthesis? between rational natural law and romantic historicism, should not be overlooked. We show how in his earliest scholarly work on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke the shift in the meaning of the two concepts ?Gemeinschaft? and ?Gesellschaft? represents a departure from (...) early liberal enlightenment to a Weltanschauung marked by romantic authors such as Fichte, Novalis and Haller, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer and Marx, notwithstanding Tönnies' adherence to the political and social values of a liberal civil society. (shrink)

John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects has meet resistance. In this paper I bypass the traditional critiques of the distinction and instead concentrate on two specific counterexamples to the distinction: Killer yellow and the puzzle of multiple dispositions. One can accommodate these puzzles, I argue, by adopting Thomas Reid’s version of the primary/secondary quality distinction, where the distinction is founded upon conceptual grounds. The primary/secondary quality distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. A consequence of Reid’s primary/ (...) secondary quality distinction is that one must deny the original version of Molyneux’s question, while one must affirm an amended version of it. I show that these two answers to Molyneux’s question are not at odds with current empirical research. (shrink)

In Hobbes' Theorie des Leviathan sind weder der Naturzustand noch der staatliche Zustand und das Strafrecht widersprüchlich. Der radikale Subjektivismus ist der archimedische Punkt, von dem aus sich die scheinbaren Widersprüche auflösen lassen. Locke kehrt zu einem Rechtsobjektivismus zurück, hat aber kein Prinzip der Begrenzung von Strafen.

Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I (...) discuss the plausibility of this claim in light of the relevant historical and textual evidence. (shrink)

This study explores how a rethinking of empiricism can affect our understanding of texts in the traditions which responded to it: English Romantic poetry, German critical philosophy, and psychoanalysis. By reading empirical philosophy with close attention to its literary texture, to its narrative and figurative patterns, the dissertation reveals a kind of critical self-awareness within empiricism itself, a persistent questioning of the referential status of experiential language. It is this questioning which, beyond the conceptual rejection of empiricism by later writers, (...) returns in the figurative structures of their discourse. The distinction between empiricism and its critique, here designated as the opposition between empiricism and criticism, thus comes to be explored, from the perspective of this study, as a dynamic which concretely forms, and deforms, each of the texts under consideration, a tension between the assertion of reference and the questioning of its conditions. The analysis of texts which, drawn from the Enlightenment and from the Romantic tradition, explicitly define themselves in terms of empirical understanding and critical self-consciousness, thus leads to an unsettling of the boundaries between genres, and in this light, a reconsideration of general questions of interpretation, with regard to narratives of origin and the vocabulary of experience. ;The four chapters--each of which is devoted primarily to one author--are framed by two confrontations between self-understanding and madness: the madness of endless mourning in Locke, and the neurosis of civilization in Freud. In this movement from madness to madness, critical knowledge emerges around the repeated encounter with a kind of non-knowing, an encounter which guides Wordsworth's narrative of poetic origins as well as Kant's logic of conceptual self-limitation. In each case, the turn away from empiricism will be haunted by the return of an "empirical" language that inhabits, but remains unsubsumable by, either empirical experience or critical self-reflection. It is this textual turning and returning which, the dissertation argues, joins together, paradoxically enough, the critical self-questioning inherent in empiricism, and the insistence of "empiricism" in theories of self-understanding. (shrink)

The doctrine of abstract ideas contains Locke’s views on the nature of generality and how we think in general terms-the nature of universals, of general concepts, and how we classify. While Reid rejects abstract ideas, he accepts Locke’s insight that we have an ability to abstract. In this paper, I show how Reid preserves Locke’s insight, while providing a more versatile and forward-looking account of universals and concepts than Locke was able to give.Reid replaces abstract ideas with what he calls (...) “general conceptions.” But general conceptions are really three different things. First, they are universals---non-mental intrinsically general objects of acts of abstraction and conception. I show how Reid is able to make the claim that there are universals without being committed to holding that universals really exist. This claim, together with his type/token distinction, enables Reid to better explain how we have knowledge of attributes and use general terms meaningfully. The general features of our experience are not ideas and are not produced by the faculty of abstraction---but that faculty enables us to distinguish them.In the second sense, a general conception is an act of mind which takes universals as objects. Thinking in general tenns is not the manipulation of abstract ideas---it is engaging in acts of conceiving. Such acts are made possible by general conceptions in the third sense, namely, general concepts. While Reid does not distinguish this sense explicitly, I argue that he takes general concepts to be dispositions or abilities to distinguish general features of objects and to use the general terms of language as other users do. So rather than producing mental entities---abstract ideas---that act as standards to help us classify, abstraction makes possible the development of abilities to use general terms and classify objects. (shrink)

This dissertation shows that Kant was perhaps more deeply influenced by Locke than most historians of philosophy have realized and than even Kant himself might have recognized. While the standard view of their relation emphasizes their difference, the dissertation examines important similarities between the philosophy of Locke and that of Kant that have not so frequently been noted. Locke's empirical enquiry is "propaedeutic" to Kant's transcendental enquiry. Although both Locke and Kant seek to justify Newtonian physics in terms of their (...) theories of knowledge, Kant, like Locke, cannot consistently hold both his philosophy of physics and his epistemology. As far as their rejection of innatism is concerned, Kant takes up where Locke left off. For Kant space and time are pure intuitions, and categories are not innate ideas. Kant's view of experience complements Locke's view. Kant's distinction between the passivity and the activity of the mind corresponds to Locke's distinction between the passivity of the mind with respect to simple ideas and the activity of the mind with respect to complex ideas. Kant's view of synthetic a priori judgments has its root in Locke's discussion of the certainty of general propositions and of the certainty of knowledge. Locke's propositions about substances and mathematical propositions are, to use Kant's terminology, synthetic a priori. (shrink)

A number of commentators have recently suggested that there is a puzzle surrounding Locke’s acceptance of Newton’s Principia. On their view, Locke understood natural history as the primary methodology for natural philosophy and this commitment was at odds with an embrace of mathematical physics. This article considers various attempts to address this puzzle and finds them wanting. It then proposes a more synoptic view of Locke’s attitude towards natural philosophy. Features of Locke’s biography show that he was deeply interested in (...) mathematical physics long before the publication of the Principia. This interest was in line with important developments in the Royal Society. It is argued that Locke endorsed a two-stage approach to natural philosophy which was consistent with an embrace of both natural history and mathematical physics. The Principia can be understood as consistent with this approach. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate two interesting parallels between views discussed in John Wilkins’ Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion and positions developed by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The first parallel pertains to a faculty of inner sense. Both authors carve out a central role for this introspective perceptual modality. The second parallel pertains to volition and free will. Both authors employ an investigative methodology which privileges first-personal experiences of choosing and (...) willing. I also discuss the relationship between these two parallels and speculate about their significance. (shrink)