The Lockean Mind

Jessica Gordon-Roth, Shelley Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351583800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

John Locke (1632–1704) is considered one of the most important philosophers of the modern era and the first of what are often called 'the Great British Empiricists.' His major work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was the single most widely read academic text in Britain for fifty years after its publication and set new limits to the scope and certainty of what we can claim to know about ourselves and the natural world. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were both highly influenced by Locke's libertarian philosophical ideas, and Locke continues to have an impact on political thought, both conservative and liberal. It is less commonly known that Locke was a practicing physician, an influential interpreter of the Bible, and a policy maker in the English Carolina colonies.

The Lockean Mind provides a comprehensive survey of Locke's work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising almost sixty chapters by a superb team of international contributors, the volume is divided into twelve parts covering the full range of Locke's thought:

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• Historical Background
• Locke's Interlocutors
• Locke's Epistemology
• Locke's Philosophy of Mind
• Locke on Philosophy of Language and Logic
• Locke's Metaphysics
• Locke's Natural Philosophy
• Locke's Moral Philosophy
• Locke on Education
• Locke's Political Philosophy
• Locke's Social Philosophy
• Locke on Religion

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Locke's work is central to epistemology; metaphysics; philosophy of mind; philosophy of language; natural philosophy; ethical, legal-political, and social philosophy; as well as philosophy of education and philosophy of religion. This volume will also be a valuable resource to those in related humanities and social sciences disciplines with an interest in John Locke.

PART 1
Historical background

1
Life and works

J. R. Milton

Locke was born on 29 August 1632 at Wrington, Somerset, into a family of very minor – indeed marginal – gentry, and grew up in Pensford, a village seven miles south of Bristol. In the first Civil War (1642–6) his father served in one of the parliamentary armies, and the commander of his regiment, Alexander Popham, recommended Locke for a place at Westminster School, which he entered in 1647. In May 1652 he was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. It was a position that could be held for life, and was broadly equivalent to a fellowship in one of the other colleges, though it gave no part in the government of the college; Locke retained his studentship until he was expelled by royal command in 1684, though from 1667 onwards he was only infrequently resident in Oxford.

Locke’s earliest publications were four poems in three university commemorative volumes, Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria (1654), Britannia Rediviva (1660), and Domiduca Oxoniensis (1662). Shortly after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 he wrote – though in the end chose not to publish – a short treatise on the question Whether the Civil Magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to Religious Worship, directed against a colleague at Christ Church, Edward Bagshaw. Locke answered the question affirmatively, but the divergence of his views from those put forward in his later writings on religious toleration should not be exaggerated: in 1660 Locke was concerned with the power of the civil government to determine modes of worship in the established church, while from 1667 onwards the issue was the extent to which liberty should be granted to independent congregations.

All Locke’s other writings of any extent from these years at Christ Church were written in Latin, and evidently designed for an academic purpose. The most important are eight disputations – scholastic in form, though far more rhetorical than their medieval predecessors – that were published in the twentieth century under the title Essays on the Law of Nature. They provide the fullest account we have of a topic that is central to Locke’s thought, but which he never again discussed in detail.

From the late 1650s onwards Locke began keeping detailed records on his reading in a succession of commonplace books; the surviving examples show that much of this was on natural philosophy and medicine. He had made the acquaintance of Robert Boyle, and gained considerable familiarity with the newly fashionable mechanical philosophy, as expounded by Boyle and Descartes. He also acquired a good first-hand knowledge of practical chemistry.

In the summer of 1666 Locke had a chance meeting with Anthony Ashley Cooper, then Lord Ashley and subsequently first Earl of Shaftesbury, and in the spring of the following year he left Oxford and travelled to London, where he was given accommodation in Ashley’s London residence, Exeter House; he was to stay there for the next eight years. His initial responsibility was to act as tutor to Ashley’s teenage son, the future second Earl, but these duties seem not to have been exacting, and Locke had ample leisure for other things. Within a year of his coming to London he had written An Essay Concerning Toleration, in which he moved decisively away from the position he had taken in 1660 and advocated the toleration of all modes of worship, giving the magistrate the right to intervene only when civil order was at risk.

Locke continued to read a wide range of medical authors, but was now able to supplement what had hitherto been an almost exclusively theoretical education with clinical experience. Shortly after arriving at Exeter House he made the acquaintance of the physician Thomas Sydenham, and soon the two men were collaborating closely. Among the Shaftesbury papers in the National Archives there are two short medical essays in Locke’s hand, Anatomia (1668) and De Arte Medica (1669); although sometimes attributed to Sydenham, they were almost certainly composed by Locke. Both works expressed a profound scepticism about our capacity to discover the nature of diseases, and advocated a purely empirical approach to medical practice.

In the eyes of posterity – and perhaps in his own – Locke’s most important intellectual activity at Exeter House was the composition of two unfinished works on the human understanding, now seen as drafts of the Essay. Locke was working on the first of these, Intellectus humanus cum cognitionis certitudine et assensus firmitate, in the summer of 1671 (despite its Latin title, the work – now generally known as Draft A – is in English). A longer and considerably more polished treatise, An Essay Concerning the Understanding, Knowledge, Opinion and Assent (Draft B), was begun later in the same year. Both works remained unfinished, and Locke seems not to have resumed systematic work on philosophy until 1676, when he was in France.

In November 1675 Locke left Exeter House and crossed over to France for a visit that was to last nearly three and a half years. On his arrival he began keeping a journal, a practice that he was to continue until the end of his life. In later years the number of entries grew smaller, especially after 1689, but the volumes covering the years in France make it possible, for the first time in Locke’s life, to construct an almost day-by-day account of his movements and activities. They also contain a number of entries on philosophical matters. One consequence of Locke’s residence in France was that he quickly began to acquire a competence in the French language, something he had previously lacked (there are no citations made before 1676 from any French books among his papers). Some French philosophy – notably Descartes’ complete writings – had long been available in Latin, but philosophy in France was increasingly being written in the vernacular, and by learning French Locke was able to gain access to philosophical debates from which he had previously been excluded.

Locke exhibited a wide-ranging curiosity about aspects of French life. He witnessed the increased harassment by the authorities of the Protestant communities, whose remaining liberties were being steadily eroded (they were finally to be extinguished by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685). All this further increased Locke’s loathing of religious persecution.

Locke arrived back in England at the end of April 1679. The country to which he returned was in a state of acute political crisis, following the (largely fraudulent) revelations in August 1678 of the Popish Plot – an imaginary attempt to remove Charles II from the throne and replace him with his Catholic brother, James Duke of York. Shaftesbury and his associates made several unsuccessful attempts to divert the succession to the throne away from the Duke of York by forcing an Exclusion Bill through Parliament and then coercing the King into giving it his assent. Locke was caught up in the turmoil, and at some stage in the early 1680s put together two closely related works on politics. One was an extended attack on the account of the origins of government that had been put forward by Sir Robert Filmer, whose main work, Patriarcha: or, The Natural Power of Kings, was published posthumously in 1680. Locke set out to demolish this theory by relentlessly destroying every part that appeared vulnerable; his attack was contained in a massive treatise that was much longer than the truncated portion published in 1689 as the first of the Two Treatises of Government. The second work was a more general, theoretical treatment of the origin, extent, and end of civil government, and formed the positive counterpart to the attack on patriarchalism: Locke saw that in order to change the way that people thought about politics, it was necessary not merely to undermine Filmer’s theory but to provide a credible alternative. This in due course became the second of the Two Treatises, though it was revised to an unknown extent in 1689, when the political situation had changed, and the need was not for an attack on the government of Charles II but for a defence of the title to the throne of his nephew, William III.

Another polemical work dating from this period has remained unpublished. In 1680 the Dean of St Paul’s, Edward Stillingfleet, published a sermon directed against Protestant nonconformists entitled The Mischief of Separation; the next year he followed this with a longer treatise, The Unreasonableness of Separation. Among Locke’s papers in the Bodleian Library (MS Locke c. 34) there survives an extended reply to both of these works, partly in Locke’s hand, partly in that of his manservant Sylvester Brounower, but mostly in the hand of his friend James Tyrrell. It has in the past been assumed that this work was a joint venture by Locke and Tyrrell, but recent analyses suggest that Locke was the sole author and Tyrrell was merely serving as his amanuensis while he was unwell.

From the summer of 1681 onwards the political tide turned against Shaftesbury, and in November 1682 he fled to the Netherlands, where he died two months later. Locke remained in England, but he too began to feel in danger, and in the late summer of 1683 disappeared from England, arriving at Rotterdam in early September but quickly moving to Amsterdam. His exile gave him the leisure to resume work on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and as it took shape he sent copies to his friends in England. In April 1686 he sent an unspecified portion, probably containing Books I and II; Book III followed in August, and Book IV in December. By the end of 1686 the Essay seems to have existed in a form fairly close to that in which it was published in 1689.

In the autumn of 1685 Locke interrupted his labours on the Essay to write another, shorter work, probably stimulated by Louis XIV’s recent revocation the Edict of Nantes, which had removed the last remnants of toleration for the French Protestants. The Epistola de Tolerantia was addressed to Locke’s friend Philippus van Limborch, who kept the manuscript, and subsequently arranged for it to be printed at Gouda in April 1689, two months after Locke had returned to England. The Epistola developed further the theory of toleration already put forward in the 1667 Essay Concerning Toleration. Locke advocated a complete separation of church and state: states exist only for the preservation of their members’ civil goods; churches are purely voluntary societies which are allowed to exercise discipline over their members, but which anyone can leave at any time without incurring any civil disabilities. Complete toleration should be given to any religious body, Christian or non-Christian, whose doctrines were not incompatible with civil society, and which did not require its adherents to give allegiance to a foreign prince.

One of the many friends whom Locke had made in Amsterdam was Jean Le Clerc, who in 1686 began publishing a new periodical, the Bibliothèque universelle et historique. The second volume (May–August) included a short piece by Locke, ‘Méthode nouvelle de dresser des recueuils,’ which described the method of organising a commonplace book that Locke had been using since 1660. Apart from his poems and a very short piece on poisonous fish that appeared in 1675 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, it was Locke’s first publication. He also provided Le Clerc with a rather superficial review of Newton’s Principia in March 1688; this was a formidably difficult work, and though Locke grasped something of its significance, he lacked the mathematical expertise to penetrate at all deeply into what Newton had achieved.

A slightly earlier number of the Bibliothèque (January 1688) contained Locke’s first publication of real importance, ‘Extrait d’un livre Anglois … intitulé Essai Philosophique concernant L’entendement,’ a substantial abridgement of the still unpublished Essay. Locke also arranged for the printer to produce a stock of separate copies and had them circulated among his acquaintances in both England and Holland.

In November 1688 William of Orange invaded England, and by the end of the year James II had fled to France. Locke returned in February 1689, and settled in Westminster. He spent much of the remainder of 1689 preparing for publication the two works on which his reputation largely rests: the Two Treatises of Government and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The authorship of the Essay was made clear by Locke’s name at the end of the Epistle Dedicatory, but the Two Treatises was anonymous. Both went on sale before the end of the year, though in each case with the date 1690 on the title page. A slightly earlier publication was a translation of the Epistola de Tolerantia undertaken by a friend of Locke, William Popple, and also published without any indication of authorship. For most English-speaking readers Popple’s translation, A Letter Concerning Toleration, provides the easiest route to understanding Locke’s theory, but the work was done without any known input from Locke, and in certain crucial respects does not render his thought with complete accuracy. The book soon aroused controversy. An Oxford clergyman, Jonas Proast, published a vigorous attack in April 1690, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Consider’d and Answer’d. Locke replied later in the summer with a short Second Letter Concerning Toleration; he chose not to reveal his identity and posed as a third party taking the side of the author of the original Letter. The Second Letter failed to satisfy Proast, and a further attack by him provoked Locke into elaborating a very much longer reply: A Third Letter for Toleration was completed in June 1692, and appeared in November. For the time being Proast made no response, and the controversy ceased.

Once the Third Letter for Toleration was out of the way, Locke’s thoughts turned to a less controversial work. While in Holland he had begun sending his friend Edward Clarke a series of letters giving detailed advice about the upbringing of Clarke’s children. Most of Some Thoughts Concerning Education was taken from these letters though some new material was added. Of all Locke’s works it is the one that arguably reveals the most about the personality of its author.

By the time Some Thoughts was published, in July 1693, Locke was living at Oates, a small moated manor house near High Laver in Essex, the home of Sir Francis Damaris Masham; Lady Masham, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, had been a close friend and important correspondent of Locke since the early 1680s, sharing his interest in philosophical enquiries. Locke was to live at Oates for the remainder of his life, though for the next few years he was forced to spend quite long periods in London attending to government business.

A second edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in May 1694. The part of the chapter ‘Of Power’ that dealt with freedom was entirely recast, and there was a new chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity,’ in which Locke equated personal identity with continuity of consciousness, and not with continuity of any spiritual substance.

Locke spent the early months of 1695 at Oates, working on a new project. The Reasonableness of Christianity was published anonymously near the beginning of August 1695, and at once aroused controversy. The enterprise of presenting Christianity as reasonable caused little offence, but many readers regarded Locke’s version of Christianity as unduly attenuated: a simple requirement of acknowledging Jesus to be the Messiah seemed to indicate a concealed sympathy with the anti-tri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction to the volume
• Part 1 Historical background
• Part 2 Locke’s interlocutors
• Part 3 Locke’s epistemology
• Part 4 Locke’s philosophy of mind
• Part 5 Locke on philosophy of language and logic
• Part 6 Locke’s metaphysics
• Part 7 Locke’s natural philosophy
• Part 8 Locke’s moral philosophy
• Part 9 Locke on education
• Part 10 Locke’s political philosophy
• Part 11 Locke’s social philosophy
• Part 12 Locke on religion
• Index