Anthony Collins on the emergence of consciousness and personal identity

Philosophy Compass 4 (2):363-379 (2009)
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Abstract

The correspondence between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins of 1706–8, while not well known, is a spectacularly good debate between a dualist and a materialist over the possibility of giving a materialist account of consciousness and personal identity. This article puts the Clarke Collins Correspondence in a broader context in which it can be better appreciated, noting that it is really a debate between John Locke and Anthony Collins on one hand, and Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler on the other. Anthony Collins argues on behalf of John Locke's claim that it would be as easy for God to superadd the power of thinking to matter as for him to connect a soul to a body. Locke did not believe that matter could naturally produce thought or consciousness, but it was in God's power to make matter think. To defend Locke's claim Collins must defend the claim that there are emergent properties in the world – properties of a whole that are not possessed by the parts. Collins also defends a materialist version of Locke's account of personal identity against a variety of charges. Because the topics of debate in the correspondence are of such great interest to us, it deserves to be rescued from the neglect into which it fell and from which intellectual historians and philosophers have only recently and partially removed it.

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William Uzgalis
Oregon State University

Citations of this work

Consciousness in Early Modern Philosophy and Science.Vili Lähteenmäki - 2020 - Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences.
Anthony Collins.William Uzgalis - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Samuel Clarke.Timothy Yenter - 2020 - In Dana Jalobeanu & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences.

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References found in this work

An essay concerning human understanding.John Locke - 1689 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Pauline Phemister.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.John Locke - 1979 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 169 (2):221-222.
Emergent properties.Timothy O'Connor - 1994 - American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (2):91-104.
Personal Identity.John Perry (ed.) - 1975 - Berkeley: University of California Press.

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