John Locke

This entry explores two features of John Locke’s (1632-1704) theological commitments: the existence and nature of God; and, the nature of punishment in the afterlife. Locke argues for a cogitative and immaterial God. Locke also denies eternal damnation, or eternal punishment and torment in the afterlife. The goal of this entry is to not only showcase Locke’s often overlooked discussion of eternal damnation, but also to show how this discussion, and Locke’s treatment of God, link up with his groundbreaking and (...) influential discussion of persons and their persistence conditions. (shrink)

John Locke (1632–1704) added the chapter in which he treats persons and their persistence conditions (Book 2, Chapter 27) to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1694, only after being encouraged to do so by William Molyneux (1692–1693).[1] Nevertheless, Locke’s treatment of personal identity is one of the most discussed and debated aspects of his corpus. Locke’s discussion of persons received much attention from his contemporaries, ignited a heated debate over personal identity, and continues to influence (...) and inform the debate over persons and their persistence conditions. This entry aims to first get clear on the basics of Locke’s position, when it comes to persons and personal identity, before turning to areas of the text that continue to be debated by historians of philosophy working to make sense of Locke’s picture of persons today. It then canvases how Locke’s discussion of persons was received by his contemporaries, and concludes by briefly addressing how those working in metaphysics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have responded to Locke’s view—giving the reader a glimpse of Locke’s lasting impact and influence on the debate over personal identity. (shrink)

John Locke was a British philosopher, medical researcher, and Oxford academic whose substantial contributions to political theory and philosophy made him a prominent and influential Enlightenment thinker. In his monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke attempted to find the limits of human understanding with respect to a wide range of topics, including personal identity across time. Although Locke knew how counterintuitive it would seem to say that personal identity across time is not sameness of thinking substance (material or immaterial) (...) across time, his major contribution was in illuminating how important psychological continuity is for our deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment. In this essay I critically explore and expand upon Locke’s arguments for his view that, regardless of what our consciousness attaches to, nothing but a relation of first-person consciousness (via memory) unites thinking beings across time into one and the same person, and thus explains how we can be justly accountable for our past actions. (shrink)

This dissertation articulates our human capacity to judge as a capacity for knowledge, specifically for empirical knowledge, and for knowledge of itself as such. I interpret and draw on the account of such knowledge presented by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, situate this account historically, and relate it to relevant contemporary debates. The first chapter motivates my project by assessing the insights and shortcomings of Cartesian epistemology. I argue that while Descartes draws on the essential self-consciousness of judgement to show (...) that the cogito is knowledge, he fails, by his own standards, to secure this status for any judgement beyond the cogito. I conclude that self-consciousness alone is empty, but that, since we can judge beyond the cogito, judgement can be given content from elsewhere. The next chapter evaluates the empiricist doctrine that operations of the senses by themselves give content to judgement and can vindicate it as empirical knowledge. I contend that Kant deepens Hume’s finding, that empiricism fails to enable us to explain empirical knowledge, into the more radical insight that empiricism fails to enable us to understand the senses as providing any content. I conclude that the senses alone are blind and that our account of empirical knowledge must privilege neither sensory givenness nor intellectual self-consciousness. The third chapter contrasts two readings of Kant on the cooperation between sensibility and understanding in empirical knowledge. I argue, against many Kantians, that the Transcendental Deduction shows that instead of understanding this cooperation compositionally – so that operations of sensibility are intelligible independently of acts of the understanding – we must conceive of it hylomorphically – so that the operations of sensibility and understanding constitute the mutually dependent matter and form of empirical knowing respectively. The final chapter substantiates this hylomorphism by explicating the form of knowledge as synthesis. Following Kant, I argue that inference is a species of synthesis and provide a synthetic explanation of inference. The resulting account simultaneously illustrates synthesis, addresses a prominent contemporary problem regarding the nature of inference, and explains how our capacity to know provides not just isolated glimpses of empirical reality, but a unified conception of it. (shrink)

An Essay concerning Human Understanding , by John Locke ISBN: 0198245955. This is the standard scholarly edition of Locke's Essay published by Oxford and edited by Peter Nidditch. This version contains countless aids for the scholar and student and is the version of the..

The article presents a critical analysis of views on the problem of personal identity which are proposed by two great English philosophers — John Locke and Derek Parfit. Lockean personality is considered as a basic metaphysical structure, subject to moral responsibility for all actions performed on its behalf. Parfitian personality, in contrast, denies any identical essence through time as an extremely improbable metaphysical structure, instead assuming an existential chain of one life’s stages with psychological continuity. As an alternative to these (...) views, a several of additional arguments are considered to support the physicist view of human nature. (shrink)

This essay defends two theses regarding the explanation, or ground, of modality in the early modern period. First, for philosophers in the period, essences ground a range of important modal facts. Second, as the period progresses, we witness increased skepticism about certain modal facts, due to a growing skepticism about the scope or existence of essences. These theses are supported by examination of three case studies: Descartes’ treatment of substance and mode (which forms the core of his ontology); Malebranche’s treatment (...) of causation (which bears on his defense of occasionalism); and Locke’s treatment of necessary connections among properties (which is related to his accounts of individuals and kinds). It is shown that in each case, claims about necessity and possibility take center stage, and that in each case, the status of these claims hinges on the status of claims about essences. (shrink)

Ao refletir sobre o problema da identidade pessoal, Leibniz dialoga diretamente com Locke, a quem procura demonstrar que a consciência, concebida à maneira cartesiana, não é o único critério de identidade da pessoa humana. Nesse diálogo, Hobbes desempenha um papel essencial, que é triplo: primeiramente, na medida em que contribui, graças à sua teoria da pessoa natural, para distinguir o problema metafísico da individuação da substância e o problema moral da identidade da pessoa; depois, na medida em que coloca em (...) questão, por meio de sua teoria da mortalidade humana, o próprio princípio da identidade metafísica dos homens, isto é, a sua imortalidade substancial; por fim, na medida em que fornece a Leibniz um conceito de consciência que permite contestar o primado da consciência cartesiana como critério exclusivo de identidade pessoal do homem. (shrink)

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In this paper I examine Locke’s criticism of the view that some species of natural objects are determined by real essences, a view I call species realism. Most commentators have focused either on Locke’s putative objections to the realist’s claim that species determining real essences exist or on his semantic case against the assumption that our species terms can refer to real essences that determine species. I identify another objection, which, I argue, is independent from both of these lines of (...) criticism. This objection is essentially practical. It is based on the claim that adopting species realism has detrimental practical consequences: it undermines, Locke believes, our ability to sort particular natural objects into species. This alone, he argues, is already sufficient to set aside and ignore species realism when trying to sort objects into species. (shrink)

Aristotle’s conception of causality and the ones Modern philosophers have bequeathed us have been exhaustively discussed, although the contrast between them has not, in my opinion, been sufficiently highlighted. This paper proposes to fill this gap. I start with Aristotelian causality and his theses that causal explanation requires knowledge of causal laws and that the necessity associated with these laws presupposes the existence of causal powers. I discuss next Locke’s and Leibniz’s attempts to modernize Aristotle’s theses on causality. The third (...) part of the paper presents two paradoxes Hume identified, on the one hand, between Locke’s and Leibniz’s theses about our knowledge of causal laws and, on the other hand, between the Aristotelian thesis that there must be causal powers and the scientific practice of Modernity. Hume’s proposal to eliminate these paradoxes is also discussed. I finish with some critical remarks on the humean model about our knowledge of causal laws as compared with his contribution to the analysis of the concept of causality. (shrink)

Sobre el “triángulo general” de Locke, de Evert Willem Berth.

Locke is famed for his caution in speculative matters: “Men, extending their enquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing; ‘tis no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes”. And he is skeptical about the pretensions of natural philosophy, which he says is “not capable of being made a science”. And yet Locke is confident that “Our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, (...) that there is an eternal, most powerful and most knowing being; which whether anyone will please to call God it matters not”. His certainty about the existence and attributes of God, I will argue, led him to surprisingly strong convictions about a deep and disputed problem at the intersection of seventeenth century metaphysics and natural philosophy: the absolute reality of space and time. Specifically, he based his absolutist conceptions of space and time on God’s literal omnipresence and eternity. Leibniz probably had Locke in mind when he inveighed in 1716 against “real absolute space, the idol of some modern Englishmen”. And Leibniz was right a decade earlier to voice through his mouthpiece Theophilus the suspicion that, despite Locke’s claim to know nothing about the substance of void space, “there are grounds for thinking you know more about it than you say or believe that you do. Some people have thought that God is the place of objects”. (shrink)

이 논문의 목적은 두 가지다. 하나는 로크의 자연관을 분석하는 데 있다. 이를 위해 필자는 로크의 자연관이 잘 드러나고 있는 『통치론』의 제2장과 제4장을 토대로 로크의 자연관의 핵심을 드러내고자 시도하였다. 다른 하나의 목적은 로크의 자연관을 환경윤리적 관점에서 분석하는 것이다. 환경윤리적 관점에서 볼 때 로크는 제한적 인간중심주의자, 제한적 프론티어윤리 제창자로 규정지을 수 있었다. 그리고 로크의 자연관을 분석하는 과정에서 발견할 수 있었던 더욱 중요한 사실은 로크식 관점이었다. 로크식 관점이란 우리가 누리고 있는 자연자원은 총체적으로 어느 특정 국가의 소유가 아니라 인류의 공유물․공동자산으로 여기는 관점을 말한다. 이러한 (...) 관점은 환경문제를 해결해나가는 데 하나의 소중한 돌파구를 제공해줄 수 있다는 점에서 큰 의의가 있다고 판단된다. 이 논문에서는 로크식 관점과 그 의의에 대해서도 자세히 밝히고 있다. (shrink)

This chapter examines John Locke's interest in and views on the Cartesian vortex theory.

JohnLocke’s 1700–1702 correspondencewith Dutch Arminian Philippus van Limborch has been taken by commentators as the motivation for modifications to the fifth edition of “Of Power,” the chapter in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that treats freedom. In this paper, I offer the first systematic and chronological study of their correspondence. I argue that the heart of their disagreement is over how they define “freedom of indifference.” Once the importance of the disagreement over indifference is established, it is clear that when (...) Locke altered parts of “Of Power” as a reaction to Limborch’s questioning, he did so in the interest of further clarifying and solidifying his view, not changing it. Seeing how they disagree over indifference also allows us to see the correspondence as showcasing the conflict between intellectualism, the view that cognitive states determine the will, and voluntarism, the view that the will alone determines action. (shrink)

Locke is often interpreted as having attempted to build a foundation for knowledge based on ideas. However, textual evidence shows that the corpuscular philosophy is also a fundamental part of that foundation. Somewhat anachronistically, but also very usefully, Locke can be described as inferring corpuscularianism by an inference to the best explanation. Locke felt justified in believing that the corpuscular philosophy was the correct description of the world because it provided us with a better explanation of a wider variety of (...) phenomena than competing hypotheses.Keywords: John Locke; Robert Boyle; Induction; Inference to the best explanation; Corpuscular philosophy. (shrink)

Ten chapters of Locke's 1685 draft are given here, with an introduction, an index of correlating passages in the Essay and the draft, and an interpretive essay, "Locke on Active Power and the Idea of Active Power from Bodies." The passages discuss various aspects of Locke's views on power and causation, including his distinction between active and passive powers, the relation between active power and minds, passive power and bodies, the origin of the idea of power, the definition of qualities (...) as powers, the distinction between actual and potential qualities, our ignorance of the causal basis of properties, and the nature of the causal relation between inner constitutions and sensible qualities of bodies. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an analysis, reconstruction and defense of Locke's account of personal identity. I begin with a detailed analysis of Locke's use of the term 'conscious' in its historical context. This term, which plays a central role in Locke's theory, had senses in the seventeenth century which it does not have today. In the light of this analysis, an interpretation of continuity of consciousness as the ancestral of memory is given. It is argued that this interpretation of (...) Locke's theory of personal identity does not involve an ontological commitment to immaterial substances, and Locke is defended against the historically important criticisms of Butler and Reid. In the conclusion I suggest that the account of the individuation of persons implicit in Locke's discussion of personal identity is similar to the account of contextual individuation given by Hintikka. (shrink)