Locke and Other Philosophers

Judging failed attempts by Descartes in explaining existence, John Locke develops the philosophical school of empiricism which has since been traditionally viewed as a contrast to Descartes' rationalism. He first rejected the so-called innate principles introduced by Descartes' rational school and then referred to sensation and reflection as two major sources of recognition. Locke believed that these two sources lead us to simple and compound concepts. The latter, he says, includes conceptions of substances and relations. Here, the relational compound is (...) a conception made up of two other conceptions. One of the two is the causality issue.It so seems that Locke considers causality as a conception prompted by a comparison between the conception of substance and accidents.Though a mental conception, causality, Locke maintains, has a visible abstraction. Based on his argument, prime matter's existence is provable via four causes: creation, making, innovation and changing.While confirming the cause-and-effect relation in the real world, Locke makes out that there is absolutely no way to clearly perceive causuality and the only perceivable thing is the relation or power of affection, and that should be fair enough to believe that an agent i.e. a cause does exist. (shrink)

This paper explores Locke’s thinking specifically about syllogisms and more generally about logic and proper logical method. Locke’s texts display a mixed attitude toward syllogisms. On the one hand, he was highly critical of syllogisms and their central role in Scholastic disputation. On the other hand, he sometimes allowed that syllogisms could effectively capture valid forms of inference and could be useful in certain contexts. This paper seeks to explain Locke’s mixed attitude by showing that he believed syllogisms were useful (...) in the context of explanation but not in the context of discovery. Syllogisms could help to formalize and evaluate arguments already constructed using informal psychologistic methods, but they would not help to generate new arguments or to make new discoveries. The second part of the paper examines substantial changes to the fourth edition of the Essay in which Locke expands his critical remarks on syllogisms and related topics. Evidence is presented that strongly suggests Locke made these changes to the Essay in response to works published by John Sergeant. This discovery is important because it indicates Locke’s willingness to consider the views of his adversaries and reformulate his own views accordingly. (shrink)

This paper investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke---after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God---argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. -/- Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first is (...) that the important argument of Essay IV.x.10 is fundamentally an argument about the causation of perfections. Indeed, Locke gives multiple such arguments in the chapter. My second main claim is that my proposed reading of IV.x is not merely consistent with what Locke says elsewhere about superaddition, but also provides reasons to favor a particular understanding of what superaddition is. (shrink)

John Locke's account of personal identity is one of his most discussed theories. Opposing the Cartesian ontology of mind, Locke argued that the soul does not always think - for thinking is simply one of its operations, but not its essence -, and that personal identity consists in consciousness alone. Against Locke, an anonymous commentator published the Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding charging Locke's view with possible immorality. Catharine Cockburn rebuffed the Remarker's objections, in her Defence of Mr. (...) Locke's Essay, depicting his view as more dangerous for morality than Locke's. This paper shifts the focus from Cockburn's defence of Locke's moral thought, to her apology for his theory of personal identity, including his probabilistic arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul. This shift of focus yields an alternative account of Cockburn's originality: first, because she offered a non-substance interpretation of Locke's theory of personal identity, that, for its time, was unusual, and remains relevant for contemporary philosophical debates over Locke; and second, because, following Kristeller, in the very act of defending and articulating anew Locke's theory, Cockburn in some sense appropriated it. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now (...) forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right. (shrink)

William Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. TheEssay Concerning Human Understandingwas 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 and Mary Barber, 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 hisSome Thoughts Concerning Educationand especially by his discussion of memory in theEssay 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. (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)

Philosophical antagonism and dispute — by no means confined to the early modern period — nonetheless enjoyed a moment of particular ferment as new methods and orientations on questions of epistemology and ethics developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke played a key part in them with controversies initiated by the Essay concerning Human Understanding. This essay develops a wider typology of modes of philosophical quarrelling by focusing on a key debate — the issue of whether human nature (...) came pre-endowed with innate ideas and principles, resulting in a moral consensus across mankind, or remained, on the contrary, dependent on reason to achieve moral insight, and, in practice, divided by diverse and irreconcilable cultural practices as a result of the force of custom and the limited purchase of reason. The essay ultimately concludes on the idea that we should not only attend to the genealogy of disputes but also to the morphology of disputation as a practice. (shrink)

Leibniz's correspondence with Thomas Burnett of Kemnay is probably best known for Leibniz's attempts to communicate with Locke via Burnett. But Burnett was also, more generally a source of English intellectual news for Leibniz. As such, Burnett provided an important part of the context in which Locke was presented to and understood by Leibniz. This paper examines the Leibniz-Burnett correspondence, and argues against Jolley's suggestion that "the context in which Leibniz learned about Locke was primarily a theological one". That said, (...) in thinking about Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, and his subsequent defenses of it, Leibniz does offer an argument against Locke's book -- but not one that's closely related to Locke's theological views, or to any accusation of Socinianism. The paper also considers, by way of contrast, the way Leibniz and Burnett talk about the more obviously controversial figure John Toland. (shrink)

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700. The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy and criticised what they thought wrong. The paper also suggests new sources and (...) perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Shaftesbury started his literary career in 1698 with an edition of Whichcote’s sermons. At the same time he worked on An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and his ‘Crudities’, which were incorporated after August 1698 in the Askêmata manuscripts. In this paper I argue that Shaftesbury’s critique of John Locke is based on central ideas from Whichcote’s sermons. In his examination of Locke’s epistemology and moral philosophy he uses Whichcote’s arguments, concepts and keywords. Locke’s rejection of the ‘innate ideas’ reduces man to (...) an abstract being, ‘absolutely indifferent towards whatever is presented to him’. In opposition to this reduction he posits Whichcote’s Connatural Notions, ‘the principles of which Man doth consist, in his very first Make’, i.e. the categorial form of human feeling, discernment, understanding and judgment. These connatural principles include the idea of good and evil, i.e. the foundation of a non-legalistic, autonomous morality. (shrink)

Recent developments in our globalized world are beginning the scholarly world to answer the question pertaining to the relationship between Islam—a “faith”—and politics and governance. In order to understand the Islamic worldview from the perspective of Ibn Khaldun, with whom many modern Islamists would agree with, a comparison is made with early progenitors of liberalism and the social contract, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. By understanding the fundamental differences between the theorists, and how Ibn Khaldun’s is completely separate from the (...) western tradition, it becomes easier to understand exactly why Islamic models of governance are at direct odds with the west. The main difference between the two models of governance is the use of a fundamental criteria determining right from wrong, as opposed to Hobbes’ and Locke’s theories being based purely on assumption that the validity of their respective arguments is based upon the theory’s acceptance among the people. In other words, western political theorists lack the consistency and justification for their theories, at least from the Islamist point of view. (shrink)

The introduction considers the state of scholarship on empiricism as a philosophical and historical category, particularly as it pertains to experimental philosophy. It concludes that empiricism properly understood is a rich category encompassing epistemic, semantic, methodological, experimental, and moral elements. Its richness makes it a suitable lens through which to account for actual historical complexity. The introduction relates the category to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, who influenced all of empiricism’s elements.

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)

In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a (...) Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists' motives. Toland defends his materialism by arguing that matter is active, and argues that matter is active by using a conceivability argument. But this is not the crude conceivability argument that Locke suggests motivates materialists. This (together with reflecting on some of Hobbes's arguments) suggests that we might well tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story. (shrink)

This article discusses Galen Strawson's Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment, and Udo Thiel's The Early Modern Subject.

ExtractDamaris Masham has been described as the first woman philosopher of her Age. Her best known works, published anonymously, were ‘A Discourse Concerning the Love of God’, 1696, and ‘Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life’, 1705. To some scholars her ideas, radical for her time, are the ideas of an early feminist. Her correspondents besides Locke, included Leibniz. Damaris was 23 years old and Locke 49 when they first met in 1681.

ExtractDamaris Masham has been described as the first woman philosopher of her Age. Her best known works, published anonymously, were ‘A Discourse Concerning the Love of God’, 1696, and ‘Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life’, 1705. To some scholars her ideas, radical for her time, are the ideas of an early feminist. Her correspondents besides Locke, included Leibniz. Damaris was 23 years old and Locke 49 when they first met in 1681.Send article to KindleTo send this (...) article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.JOHN LOCKE AND DAMARIS MASHAM, NÉE CUDWORTH: QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCEVolume 12, Issue 34Terence MooreDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000092Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. JOHN LOCKE AND DAMARIS MASHAM, NÉE CUDWORTH: QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCEVolume 12, Issue 34Terence MooreDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000092Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. JOHN LOCKE AND DAMARIS MASHAM, NÉE CUDWORTH: QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCEVolume 12, Issue 34Terence MooreDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000092Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

This collection of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars presents research on Isaac Newton and his main philosophical interlocutors and critics. The essays analyze Newton's relation to his contemporaries, especially Barrow, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke and discuss the ways in which a broad range of figures, including Hume, Maclaurin, Maupertuis and Kant, reacted to his thought. The wide range of topics discussed includes the laws of nature, the notion of force, the relation of mathematics to nature, Newton's argument for universal (...) gravitation, his attitude toward philosophical empiricism, his use of 'fluxions', his approach toward measurement problems and his concept of absolute motion, together with new interpretations of Newton's matter theory. The volume concludes with an extended essay that analyzes the changes in physics wrought by Newton's Principia. A substantial introduction and bibliography provide essential reference guides. (shrink)

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke maintains that ?Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing,? including matters of religious faith, and this commitment to the primacy of reason is not abandoned in his later religious writings. This essay argues that with regard to the relation between reason and religious faith, Locke is primarily concerned not with evidence, but with consistency, meaning, and how human beings ought to respond to their inclinations, including their inclinations to believe. (...) Leibniz, on the other hand, stakes out an alternative conception of the relationship between faith and reason that assigns to faith the role of a primary truth. For Leibniz, some religious propositions can be believed immediately and without an additional examination and evaluation by reason. The essay maintains that the differences between the two regarding faith and reason are tied to a broader disagreement about how much of the human understanding is due, in Locke's words, to ?Labour, Attention and Industry? (shrink)

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)

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)

Marx supposedly represents a radical break from liberal individualist property oriented thinking. In fact however, Marx integrates the best points of a variety of liberal individualists, notably Locke and Rousseau, but also to a lesser extent Aristotle and even Plato. Marx is an extension of, not a break from, mainstream thinkers in Western thought: all Marx’s main ideas can be traced to one canonical Western scholar or another. Understanding analytical tools common to both Liberalism and Marxism contextualizes their divergences and (...) allows one to better understand both the successes and failures of Marxism as a critique in practice of liberal state theory. (shrink)

Chapter 20 of book II of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, titled ‘Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain’ is the most extensive discussion of emotions available in Locke’s corpus. Likewise, Nouveaux essais sur l’entedement humain, II, xx, together with the following chapter xxi remains the chief source of Leibniz’s views of emotions. They offer a very interesting and captivating discussion of moral philosophy and good life. The chapter provides also a great platform to study Leibniz’s argumentative techniques and (...) the differences between the philosophers in general. Locke strives to explain the emotions with a single, unifying notion of uneasiness while Leibniz’s view of the mind is much more complex and he finds more unique ways of explaining different emotions. My paper focuses on Leibniz’s critique of Lockean uneasiness as an explanans for emotions. He views uneasiness as a unavoidable part of all our mental states and therefore it is not sufficient to explain passions or moral wrong-doing of men. I will discuss such passions as love, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, despair, anger, envy and shame and consider Locke’s possible response to Leibniz’s critique. (shrink)

The Early Modern Subject explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity--two fundamental features of human subjectivity--as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and (...) personal identity is in many ways characteristic and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases. (shrink)

The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea-grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled 'ideists'. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certainty, as initially developed in his Restoration polemics against Anglican divines. Using a previously neglected autobiographical letter, (...) it is demonstrated that Sergeant's intentions were very different. Like Edward Stillingfleet and other critics, Sergeant saw Locke's philosophy as inspiring contemporary heterodoxy. The article identifies the specific channels by which Sergeant saw Lockeanism seeping into irreligion. Moreover, unlike Locke's Anglican critics, Sergeant resorted not to polemical accusations, but to abstract philosophy. This must also be explained contextually: Sergeant wished his works to become textbooks at the universities, concerned as he was by the pedagogical impact of the Essay. A premise of this article is that reception history is less useful for elucidating on the meaning of the received text than for telling us something about the intentions of the receiver, and about the intellectual culture in which the process of reception occurs. With this in mind, the article finishes by recontextualizing Sergeant's works within a broader narrative: his was an attempt to reassert the place of philosophy as a propaedeutic to theology in an age when such a conception of philosophy's social role was coming under intense scrutiny. (shrink)

Die Intention meiner Arbeit ist, einige Elemente in Miltons und Lockes politischen Schriften aufzuweisen, abhängig von ihren Einstellungen zu diversen Medien. Milton hat in seiner Argumentierung gegen die Zensur darzulegen, dass alle historischen Instanzen der Zensur – gewöhnlich zitiert in seinem Jahrhundert – als Beispiele eines anderen Phänomens ausgedeutet werden können. Demgegenüber erkennt Milton, indem er unterschiedliche Loci in Platons Der Staat sowie einigen biblischen Themen analysiert, die Reichweite als auch Gewichtigkeit der nichtbegrifflichen, ungedruckten, nichtverbalen Kommunikationsformen; er schildert sie als (...) Zeichen des kindischen, weiblichen oder ungebildeten Verhaltens, als wertlose Phänomene aus dem Blickwinkel der in der Pressefreiheit verkörperten politischen Libertät. John Lockes Einstellung ist übereinstimmend. Ich erläutere eine Ideenkette, analog zu jener Miltons, in seinen Werken Zwei Abhandlungen über die Regierung und Epistola de tolerantia, indem ich die Analyse auf den Begriff der Adiaphora fokussiere. (shrink)

Namjera je ovog rada pokazati neke elemente Miltonovih i Lockeovih političkih spisa, ovisno o njihovim odnosima prema različitim medijima. Milton u svojoj argumentaciji protiv cenzure mora pokazati da se sve drevne instance za cenzuru, često citirane u njegovom stoljeću, mogu interpretirati kao primjeri drugog fenomena. Međutim, Milton prepoznaje, analizirajući mjesta u Platonovoj Državi i nekim biblijskim temama, doseg i značaj nepojmovnih, netiskanih, neverbalnih oblika komunikacije; on ih opisuje kao znakove djetinjastog, ženskog ili neobrazovanog ponašanja, kao beznačajne fenomene iz perspektive političke (...) slobodne utjelovljene u slobodi tiska. Stav Johna Lockea je isti. Pokazat ću lanac ideja, sličan Miltonovom, u njegovim djelima Dvije rasprave o vladi i Pismo o toleranciji, fokusirajući analizu na pojam adijafore. (shrink)

En 1974, Robert Nozick publicó *Anarquía, Estado y Utopía*, una obra que, por primera vez, otorgaba estatus teórico a una de las corrientes del pensamiento neoliberal: el libertarianismo. En buena medida, el texto de Nozick se reclama como una relectura en clave de filosofía analítica de la teoría política de John Locke. En este artículo se ofrecen algunos argumentos para mostrar que, aunque la perspectiva de Nozick presenta ciertas similitudes retóricas con la obra del filósofo inglés, en cada uno de (...) los puntos fundamentales (como por ejemplo la idea de derecho, la noción de persona, el papel de la política y los conceptos de justicia y bien público) Nozick se aparta claramente de las premisas lockeanas. Como conclusión, se sostiene que al alejarse de la concepción lockeana, Nozick defiende una sociedad en la que la política está ausente y en la que el Estado aparece, paradójicamente, menos limitado que en las concepciones liberales clásicas. (shrink)

The Flow of Influence: From Newton to Locke - and Back- In this essay, the affinity between Locke’s empiricism and Newton’s natural philosophy is scrutinized. Parallels are distinguished from influences. I argue, pace G.A.J. Rogers, that Newton’s doctrine of absolute space and time influenced Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding from the second edition onwards. I also show that Newton used Lockean terminology in his criticism of Cartesianism. It is further argued that Locke’s endorsement of corpuscularianism is merely methodological, i.e. he (...) accepts it as a scientifically useful and psychologically intelligible paradigm, but not as a realist explanation of rerum natura. Like Newton, Locke was reluctant to accept the corpuscular theory of light. However, his reasons for doing so were different from those of Newton. This essay is divided into three parts: in the first, the stage is set by looking at the fundamentals of Locke’s epistemology; in the second, several correspondences between Locke’s and Newton’s thought are explored and two cases of influence are argued for; and in the third, several arguments are provided for interpreting Locke’s corpuscularianism as methodological. (shrink)

In a crucial passage of the second-edition Transcendental Deduction, Kant claims that the concept of motion is central to our understanding of change and temporal order. I show that this seemingly idle claim is really integral to the Deduction, understood as a replacement for Locke’s “physiological” epistemology (cf. A86-7/B119). Béatrice Longuenesse has shown that Kant’s notion of distinctively inner receptivity derives from Locke. To explain the a priori application of concepts such as succession to this mode of sensibility, Kant construes (...) the mind as receptive to its own activity. As Longuenesse understands Kant’s response to Locke, “motion” becomes little more than a metaphor for the action of understanding on inner sense. For Michael Friedman, in contrast, this passage evidences Kant’s deep concern with the foundations of Newtonian science. He reads it as a reference to inertial motion, the standard by which temporal intervals are measured. I show that Longuenesse’s and Friedman’s interpretations are in fact complementary. Both Locke and Kant are deeply concerned with the quantification of time. So Longuenesse is right that §24 is meant to supplant Locke’s account, and Friedman correctly takes it as the foundation of Kant’s account of the application of quantitative concepts to time. Kant aims, specifically, to explain cognition of time as continuous magnitude. However, Longuenesse leaves Kant without an answer to Locke’s challenge that continuous magnitude cannot be understood on the basis of discrete magnitude. And on Friedman’s view Kant’s account of the understanding’s activity presupposes, and thus cannot explain, the achievements of the mathematical sciences (such as the representation of temporal continuity). On my reading, Kant’s key contention is that we must regard the segregation of temporally ordered representation into units as the work of the understanding, rather than (as Locke views it) of sensibility. By giving the understanding this role, Kant succeeds where he takes Locke to fail. I show how the power to unify temporal representation can be ascribed to the understanding on the basis, not of assumed mathematical or scientific knowledge, but of its characterization as the power of judgment. (shrink)