Situating Locke’s works in their intellectual, political, and religious contexts

Abstract

A. J. Pyle’s Locke is an excellent introduction to Locke’s philosophical thought as a whole. The guiding principle of the book is that Locke’s diverse philosophical writings on epistemology, metaphysics, religion, politics, and education are all unified by the basic thesis that ‘we humans have been given enough knowledge for our needs’ (3). Considering an impressive range of issues and texts, Pyle presents Locke as a deeply systematic thinker who still has much to say that is of interest to contemporary readers. The book is organised thematically. Chapter 1 provides an engaging account of Locke’s life and times, emphasising the importance of the political and religious context of seventeenth-century Britain to what might seem to modern readers like largely unrelated concerns in epistemology and metaphysics. Chapter 2 introduces Locke’s theory of ideas, his theologically controversial attack on nativism in Book I of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and outlines the broad shape of the empiricist epistemology Locke develops in the rest of the Essay. The account of human knowledge and its limits offered by Locke in Book IV of the Essay forms the subject of Chapter 3, thereby highlighting the central epistemological aims of the work that are otherwise liable to get lost amongst the details of Books II and III: as Pyle explains (16), the Essay was originally occasioned by stalled discussions on ‘a subject very remote’—according to Locke’s friend Tyrell, ‘the principles of morality and revealed religion’—which lead Locke to the conclusion that it was first ‘necessary examine our own Abilities, and see, what Objects our Understandings were or were not fitted to deal with’ (‘Epistle to the Reader’, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 7). The following three chapters fill in some of the details. Chapter 4 considers both the importance and the limitations of Locke’s adherence to the corpuscular theory of matter. Chapter 5 addresses some key themes in Locke’s philosophy of religion. As