Locke, and: Locke, and: The Politics of Locke's Philosophy (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 973 ity that various intellectuals held views in private that were different from what was acceptable in public from 166o onward, and that their writings have to be reexamined with this fact in mind for clues as to what they actually believed. And this reconsideration may give us a better history of the emergence of "new" views at the beginning of the eighteenth century. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University John Dunn. Locke. Past Masters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 97. Cloth, $12.95. Paper, $3.95. R. S. Woolhouse. Locke. Philosophers in Context. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp ix + 198. $35.oo. Neal Wood. The Politics of Locke's Philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. xiv + 241. $~6.5o. All three of these tides manifest strong interest and first-hand research in the historical context of Locke's thought and a wide knowledge of recent secondary literature. Allowing for the different levels at which they are pitched, all are good, useful, stimulating books, which agree more than they disagree on the topics they have in common and usefully complement each other on other topics. Mr. Dunn's book is for historically aware readers coming to Locke's writings for the first time. Dr. Woolhouse provides a selective commentary for students concurrendy working with some seriousness through the text of the Essay. Professor Wood's study is for readers who already have a basic knowledge of that text. The first two of Woolhouse's four chapters are devoted to Books I and IV of the Essay, with emphasis on Locke's role as a representative of the Baconian "moderns" countering the obscurantism of the scholastic "ancients." Within this framework, chapter 3 explores the relations and differences between the different kinds of complex ideas (substances, modes, relations) in Locke's scheme of things, a subject whose centrality and importance Woolhouse has long recognized better than most scholars. Chapter 4 picks up on two other topics in corpuscularianism's response to scholasticism : primary/secondary qualities and mind/matter dualism. It is, in short, a discussion in reasonable historical depth of one particular family of problems which forms an important thread through one of Locke's major works. Woolhouse himself has no delusions about the modesty of his ambitions, which have been blown up disproportionately by pretentious promotion. Woolhouse offers students the best exposition now available of the scholastic background to the debates of Locke's daymthough some of the things said about axioms or common notions, and about the major premises of demonstrations, may cause readers to confuse these. I think, however, that the anti-scholasticism theme, while legitimate in itself, may be carrying too much freight, particularly since both 274 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Woolhouse and Wood labor it in association with one side in the ancients vs. moderns debate. This association was certainly part of the superficial rhetoric of the age, something that Locke & Co. wanted us to believe, but the historian should not he so easily kidded. Woolhouse has original things to say about Locke's attack on innatism, though he may be unduly sympathetic to Locke's side. But in arguing for a scholastic target he has to concede that innatism was certainly not Aristotelian: he fails to bring out that innatism was actually commonplace among apologists for the "moderns," like Glanvill and Boyle, .and that the language in which it was typically cast derived less from the schools than from the Bible. Baconianism is especially associated with the experimental method, however that is construed and however it is traced out in Locke's thought; the philosophical reflections associated with its scientific application owed just as much, clandestinely, to the ancients (through Epicureanism and scepticism ) as did scholastic orthodoxy. More seriously out of balance, I think, is the positive theme (sec. 9 and elsewhere) that opinion, which Locke distinguished from sensitive knowledge and investigated extensively as a field of human disagreement, is tO be assimilated to the modern concept of a posteriori knowledge. But Woolhouse cautions against various common misreadings of Locke, and I have no wish to minimize the amount of accurate, informative , lucidly presented...