The first half of this review article on Locke on primary and secondary qualities leads up to a fairly straightforward reading of what Locke says about the distinction in Essay II.viii, one that, in its general outlines, represents a sympathetic understanding of Locke’s discussion. The second half of the paper turns to consider a few of the ways in which interpreting Locke on primary and secondary qualities has proven more complicated. Here we take up what is sometimes called the Berkeleyan (...) interpretation of Locke, the understanding of Locke’s resemblance thesis, and Locke’s views of qualities and their relationship to powers. (shrink)

Locke establishes the primary-secondary quality distinction in two steps. First, he identifies the primary qualities by means of a separability argument that involves transdictive inference about the properties of the minute, imperceptible parts of matter. Second, he identifies the secondary qualities by means of a dispensability argument that relies on the principle that bodies normally act by ‘impulse.’ I suggest this principle is also justified through transdictive inference. This allows us to see Locke’s claims about primary and secondary qualities as (...) unified, fallibilist and rooted in empiricism and the methodology of Newtonian science. (shrink)

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism, Strathern’s about relatives and kinship – both of which (...) concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke’s own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern. (shrink)

This paper offers an epistemic defense of empathy, drawing on John Locke's theory of ideas. Locke held that ideas of shape, unlike ideas of color, had a distinctive value: resembling qualities in their objects. I argue that the same is true of empathy, as when someone is pained by someone's pain. This means that empathy has the same epistemic value or objectivity that Locke and other early modern philosophers assigned to veridical perceptions of shape. For this to hold, pain and (...) pleasure must be a primary quality of the mind, just as shape is a primary quality of bodies. Though Locke did not make that claim, I argue that pain and pleasure satisfy his criteria for primary qualities. I consider several objections to the analogy between empathy and shape-perception and show how Locke's theory has resources for answering them. In addition, the claim that empathetic ideas are object-matching sidesteps Berkeley's influential objection to Locke's theory of resemblance. I conclude by briefly considering the prospects for a similar defense of empathy in contemporary terms. (shrink)

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. Focusing on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, but also drawing extensively from his other writings and manuscript remains, Anstey argues that Locke was an advocate of the Experimental Philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy. On the question of method, Anstey shows how Locke's pessimism about (...) the prospects for a demonstrative science of nature led him, in the Essay, to promote Francis Bacon's method of natural history, and to downplay the value of hypotheses and analogical reasoning in science. But, according to Anstey, Locke never abandoned the ideal of a demonstrative natural philosophy, for he believed that if we could discover the primary qualities of the tiny corpuscles that constitute material bodies, we could then establish a kind of corpuscular metric that would allow us a genuine science of nature. It was only after the publication of the Essay, however, that Locke came to realize that Newton's Principia provided a model for the role of demonstrative reasoning in science based on principles established upon observation, and this led him to make significant revisions to his views in the 1690s. On the content of Locke's natural philosophy, it is argued that even though Locke adhered to the Experimental Philosophy, he was not averse to speculation about the corpuscular nature of matter. Anstey takes us into new terrain and new interpretations of Locke's thought in his explorations of his mercurialist transmutational chymistry, his theory of generation by seminal principles, and his conventionalism about species. (shrink)

Michael Jacovides provides an engaging account of how the scientific revolution influenced one of the foremost figures of early modern philosophy, John Locke. By placing Locke's thought in its scientific, religious, and anti-scholastic contexts, Jacovides explains not only what Locke believes but also why he believes it.

in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay, edited by Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

This work examines British inquiry into the human mind in the early nineteenth century using a multivalent structural analysis of ideas and practices within traditions established by Hume, Hartley, and Reid. While these traditions were propagated into the nineteenth century by such figures as Thomas Brown, James Mill, Sir William Hamilton, and Alexander Bain, this later period has received a dearth of attention in the history of psychology, the history of philosophy, and the history of ideas in general. This conspicuous (...) lacuna forms the basis for two simple questions: What was the situated significance of work on the human mind in nineteenth century Britain? What was it supposed to accomplish, or be about? ;In particular, I focus on the differentiation of science from philosophy as a particular kind of non-science, investigating a set of existing formulations of the respective characters of the two. Using this historiographic survey as a springboard, I establish an analytical apparatus based upon four structural dimensions that I term conceptual, expository, iconic, and genealogical. Taken together, these four elements form an historical problematic, a set of persistent features and issues that structured work on mental subjects. With respect to conceptual structure, I propose a set of a dozen persistently central, but fluid, concept clusters involved in the study of mind. Regarding texts themselves, I situate my subject in terms of specific audience groups, patterns of expository development, and topical scope. I also examine the limiting influence of authorial and editorial practices on the appearance of the conceptual systems these texts convey. Iconic structural patterns focus even more closely on textual content, demonstrating shifts in the density, nature, and extent of citation within the intellectual community. These four dimensions interact significantly, reflecting the complex character of an active community of intellectual discussion. ;Having established this analytical space, I return to the basic terminological distinction between science and philosophy to investigate what was at stake in distinguishing these two fields in the nineteenth century. The dichotomy was far from definitive: British mental inquiry from the time of Hume's Treatise to that of Bain's first two major works never established a firm division of science from philosophy, but the evidence suggests several directions of tension along which this split would subsequently emerge. As demonstrated by evidence from the first volume of the journal, Mind , founded by Bain in 1876, discussions among students of the human mind in the nineteenth century established a position for mental philosophy itself as arbiter of the new science-philosophy dipole. In this light, the establishment of Mind can be viewed as the creation of a boundary-object that itself constituted this distinction in psychological terms. (shrink)