Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

Bradley F. Abrams. The Struggle for the Soul of a Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism, viii + 362 pp. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory (Lon...

John Craig’s book Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology) infuriated contemporaries when it appeared in 1699. Modern scholars also express reservations about the contents. Many read the work in association with Isaac Newton and view Craig’s calculation for the Second Coming in 3150 with bemusement and condescension. Historians of statistics give the book a fairer reading, but often they look to assess the closeness of Craig’s calculations to modern mathematics. In this article, I aim to situate Craig (...) and his book as part of the deist controversy. My goal is to illustrate that the perceived danger of deism in the later seventeenth century was such that it influenced the content of a variety of discourses and that Craig’s work is representative of a moment in which apocalyptic anticipations and anxiety over deism could mix freely with mathematics and conceptions of the historical record in a presentation reminiscent of Isaac Newton’s Principia. (shrink)

This paper describes the affinities between Socinian and Unitarian materialism. Based on different philosophical traditions, the Socinian Christoph Stegmann and the Unitarian Joseph Priestley developed a strong “system of materialism” which fit very well with Christian doctrines and the Bible. The conviction that the whole man is material and therefore mortal became the common basis for these radical thinkers. Stegmann formulated within the Aristotelian tradition a “non-reductive” materialism in which matter, not form, became the fundamental principle of all living things. (...) Priestley, on the other hand, created his “absolute” materialism by developing a new understanding of the concept of matter according to the philosophical rules of Isaac Newton. The paper will discuss the affinities and differences between these two different concepts of materialism. The idea of a thinking matter, most prominently formulated by John Locke, will serve as a link between them. (shrink)