What sort of property did Locke take colors to be? He is sometimes portrayed as holding that colors are wholly subjective. More often he is thought to identify colors with dispositions—powers that bodies have to produce certain ideas in us. Many interpreters find two or more incompatible strands in his account of color, and so are led to distinguish an “official,” prevailing view from the conflicting remarks into which he occasionally lapses. Many who see him as officially holding that colors (...) are dispositions concede that some of his remarks imply that colors are in us rather than in objects. After raising some difficulties for these readings, I offer an alternative. I will argue that Locke takes colors to be relational, but not dispositional, properties of the objects around us. On his view, an object is red if and only if it is actually causing a certain sensation in some observer. (shrink)

A great deal of the criticism directed at Locke's theory of abstract ideas assumes that a Lockean abstract idea is a special kind of idea which by its very nature either represents many diverse particulars or represents separately things that cannot exist in separation. This interpretation of Locke has been challenged by scholars such as Kenneth Winkler and Michael Ayers who regard it as uncharitable in light of the obvious problems faced by this theory of abstraction. Winkler and Ayers argue (...) that Locke instead held that to have an abstract idea is to attend selectively to some portion of the content of a particular idea. On this view, to have an abstract idea is not to have a special kind of idea but to have an ordinary idea in a special way. Ayers argues that Locke inherited this theory from Arnauld. I argue that the case made by Ayers for the attribution of the extrinsic theory to Locke rests on a misinterpretation of Arnauld. In fact, both Locke and Arnauld regard selective attention as part of a process whereby a new kind of idea is constructed. (shrink)

Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well known that Malebranche’s theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche’s approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche’s view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. (...) Opponents of this approach, including Arnauld and Locke, held that our talk about ideas was not explanatory but instead merely descriptive: we use the word ‘idea’ to describe phenomena that we observe by reflecting on our own minds. This controversy has not received much attention from scholars, but in the present paper I will show that it was an explicit and important subject of concern for Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley and that attention to this controversy can illuminate several aspects of these philosophers’ work. (shrink)

The defense of common sense in Berkeley's Three Dialogues is, first and foremost, a defense of the gardener's claim to know this cherry tree, a claim threatened by both Cartesian and Lockean philosophy. Berkeley's defense of the gardener's knowledge depends on his claim that the being of a cherry tree consists in its being perceived. This is not something the gardener believes; rather, it is a philosophical analysis of the rules unreflectively followed by the gardener in his use of the (...) word 'exists'. It is by following these rules that the gardener gains knowledge of the cherry tree. Uncovering these deep connections between Berkeley's epistemology and his philosophy of language and placing them in the context of his critique of both Cartesian and Lockean philosophy will clarify Berkeley's strategy for bringing his reader back to common sense and practical engagement in the ordinary affairs of life. (shrink)

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents (...) and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances. (shrink)

Terms for consciousness, used with a cognitive meaning, emerged as count nouns in the 17th century. This transformation repeats an evolution that had taken place in late antiquity, when related vocabulary, used in the sense of conscience, went from being mass nouns designating states to count nouns designating faculties possessed by every individual. The reified concept of consciousness resulted from the rejection of the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind according to which the mind is not a countable thing, but a pure (...) potentiality. This rejection was motivated by an acute sense of the mind’s fallible subjectivity. While conditioned by recent historical events, the 17th century’s pervasive sense of subjectivity also reveals a heavy debt to Hellenistic philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered. But whereas Hellenistic thought, mistrustful of theoria, only reifies conscience, early modern thinking, more mistrustful of praxis and seeking its grounding in theoria, goes a step further and reifies consciousness. Partly modeled on theological ideas, the resulting concept of consciousness is plagued by paradoxes that have becomes notorious for their intractability. But essentially the same model of consciousness underwrites contemporary theory, embroiling contemporary debates in the same controversies that dominated the 17th century. Sidestepping these difficulties by returning to the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind would be a tall order, but it is not impossible. Alfred North Whitehead's theory of consciousness offers an example. His novel theory of time enables Whitehead to rehabilitate the Aristotelian concept of passive mind in a wholly naturalistic way. (shrink)

Discussions of John Locke’s theory of causation tend, understandably, to focus on the related notion of power and in particular the dialectic with David Hume. But Locke faces a very different threat, one that is internal to his view. For he argues both that causation is a relation and that relations are not real. The obvious conclusion is intolerable. And yet the premises, I argue, are unassailable. Building on an interpretation of Locke’s treatment of relations I have developed elsewhere, I (...) show how Locke can at once speak meaningfully of causation and deny its mind-independent existence. (shrink)

We look at some interesting and important episodes in the life of early modern Epicureanism, focusing on natural philosophy. We begin with two early moderns who had a great deal to say about ancient Epicureanism: Pierre Gassendi and Ralph Cudworth. Looking at how Gassendi and Cudworth conceived of Epicureanism gives us a sense of what the early moderns considered important in the ancient tradition. It also points us towards three main themes of early modern Epicureanism in natural philosophy, which we (...) then discuss at greater length: atomism, materialism about the mind or soul, and the denial of providence, which was often accompanied by deflationary explanations of religious belief. (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)