Introduction

This introduction presents the project of the book, to examine the seventeenth-century debate about materialism that began with the work of Thomas Hobbes. Among those who responded directly to Hobbes, the book focuses on Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. The introduction and book then look at John Locke’s discussion of materialism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which draws on and responds to that earlier discussion. A central question for all these philosophers is whether human minds are material. They also consider whether animal minds are material, and whether God is. Other philosophical issues, including theories of substance and of the nature of ideas, are repeatedly involved in the discussion. The relation of these discussions to the work of René Descartes is noted.

A Defense of Locke’s Moral Epistemology

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides an empirical account of all of our ideas, including our moral ideas. However, Locke’s account of moral epistemology is difficult to understand leading to mistaken objections to his moral epistemological theory. In this paper, I offer what I believe to be the correct account of Locke’s moral epistemology. This account of his moral epistemology resolves the objections that morality is not demonstrable, that Locke’s account fails to demonstrate the normativity of statements, and that Locke has not provided us with the means to determine the correctness of the moral rules.

“A Rough Unsightly Sketch”

This chapter surveys the manifestations of empiricist antiformalism in some early texts that ground the tradition of eighteenth-century thought on the subjects of taste and beauty, beginning with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argues for an attenuated version of form, one that eschews any trappings of scholastic or Platonic philosophy. After Locke, form cannot name anything related to substance or essence; Locke endorses its use only as a synonym for figure, that is, shape or pattern, extension in space or duration in time. Drawing on Locke's Essay, both Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson theorize beauty as a secondary quality that emanates from an object, distinct from form, which they understand as a primary quality residing in that object.

What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke

William Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was placed on the curriculum of Trinity College in 1692, soon after its publication. Yet there has been very little discussion of whether Irish women from this period read or knew Locke's work, or engaged more generally in contemporary philosophical debate. This essay focuses on the work of Laetitia Pilkington (1709–1750) and Mary Barber (1685–1755), two of the Dublin women writers of the so-called ‘Triumfeminate’, a literary and intellectual circle connected to Jonathan Swift which met and discussed ideas at the home of Patrick Delaney. Pilkington and Barber were particularly influenced by Locke's ideas on obstetrics and childhood in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education and especially by his discussion of memory in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Both authors engage playfully and imaginatively with Locke's theories, especially in a domestic context. Not all philosophical debates took place in the public male spaces of school, coffee house and university. This essay attempts to recreate the contexts in which intellectually curious women of the ‘middling sort’ encountered and engaged with philosophical ideas, especially those of Locke, and how these shaped their writing.

Review of John Locke: Les idees et les choses. Avec les manscript inedit "Notes upon Mr. John Lock's Essay concerning Human Understanding de William Whiston fils by Luisa Simonutti

A review of Luisa Simonutti's recent book John Locke: Les idees et les choses. Avec les manscript inedit "Notes upon Mr. John Lock's Essay concerning Human Understanding" de William Whiston fils (Milan: Editions Mimesis, 2019).

Reconciling Locke’s Consciousness-Based Theory of Personal Identity and His Soteriology

This article maintains that Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, which Locke expounded in book 2, chapter 27 of the second edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), perfectly fits with his views on the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, and salvation. The compatibility of Locke’s theory of personal identity with his soteriology has been questioned by Udo Thiel and Galen Strawson. These two authors have claimed that Locke’s emphasis on repentance, which he described as necessary to salvation in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), clashes with his notion of punishment as annexed to personality and, hence, to consciousness. Pace Thiel and Strawson, I argue that Locke’s theory of personal identity is compatible with his concept of repentance. To this purpose, I first explain Locke’s views on the soul’s death and the resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day, when, according to Locke, we will all be raised from death by divine miracle, but only the repentant faithful will be admitted to eternal bliss while the wicked will be annihilated. Locke’s mortalism, along with his agnosticism on the ontological constitution of thinking substances or souls, played a role in his formulation of a non-substantialist account of personal identity, because it denied the temporal continuity of the soul between physical death and resurrection and it rejected the resurrection of the same body. I then analyze Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, with a focus on the implications of this theory regarding moral accountability. Finally, I turn my attention to Thiel’s and Strawson’s considerations about Locke’s views on consciousness and repentance. To prove that Locke’s views on salvation are consistent with his theory of personal identity, I clarify Locke’s soteriology, which describes not only repentance, but also obedience, faith, and the conscientious study of Scripture as necessary to salvation.

Locke’s Experiential Persons

The second chapter examines Locke’s account of self-formation as it is presented in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). It will be argued that, for Locke, the evaluative perspective that arises when confronted with other people’s expressions of praise and blame crucially underpins the human capacity to think of themselves as persons. The second half of this chapter applies the results of this discussion to Locke’s account of personhood, as developed in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). The aim of this is to demonstrate that even here it holds that the contents of what figures in our self-conception as persons are determined by the actions we perform in the publicly accessible domain.