Locke's Epistemology Research Articles

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN JOHN LOCKE'S EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE CONDUCT OF UNDERSTANDING

This paper addresses three fundamental features of John Locke's educational philosophy, crucial to understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Locke's theory of education and the conduct of the understanding. These three features are 1) intimate connection between education and epistemology, 2) role of sensory faculties in the attainment of knowledge, and 3) the nature of ideas. In the first section, I will examine Locke's conception of epistemology and its relation to his theory of education. Being more akin to the corpuscularian view of reality, Locke believes that one should not bother about the knowledge of those things for which one is not capable due to the limits of one's sensory capacities. The second section is devoted to explaining those factors mentioned by Locke in his educational writings, which are crucial to understanding the conduct of understanding and play an important role in a child's mental development. Such as thinking habits, ideas as an object of understanding, the flexibility of mind, history, culture, language, and morality. The third section aims to clarify the meaning and nature of ideas as they are the cornerstone of Locke's epistemology which is intimately connected to his educational philosophy. Being an empiricist philosopher, he reduces man to an experiential plane of life and believes that education aims not to know all things except those that affect our conduct.

Locke's Natural and Religious Epistemology

In this paper, I am outlining a new, and perhaps controversial, account of Locke's epistemology. I argue that the common denominator in any act of assent in both the natural and religious epistemologies is the regulating role of reason. Key to the regulating role of reason is the requirement that any cognitive achievement, whether of knowledge, probability, or matter of faith, meets epistemic conditions at different stages or from different points of view. By employing the same justificatory structure throughout his epistemology, Locke offers a way in which reason can be seen to go as far as it can to justify itself (its reliability as well as its scope) from within its own natural limitations.

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature

Shaftesbury's “SUBLIME and BEAUTIFUL” Naturalism

AbstractThe 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury drew on the naturalism of Locke to open up a naturalistic reading of experience conceived as a matter of reality revealing pattern perception that was lost to view in the impact of subsequent idealist readings of Locke's epistemology offered by Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–1776). This essay recovers and explicates Shaftesbury's alternative to idealist conceptions of pattern making.

The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism by Jacopo Agnesina

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism by Jacopo Agnesina Melvyn New Jacopo Agnesina. The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018. Pp. 217. €40. In his conclusion, Mr. Agnesina summarizes his argument: "The philosophical positions sustained by Collins are crystal-clear and … obvious: the denial of God by denial of divine attributes, the denial of his [that is, God's] intelligence and design, the denial of substance duality, with the affirmation of materialistic monism, the affirmation of a mechanicistic [sic] and determined philosophy, etc." He then adds, significantly, that "Collins was more attached to freedom of thought than to his own convictions." As demonstrated in perhaps his best-known work, Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729), Collins would have enjoyed the irony of his convictions being "crystal-clear" to his modern interpreter. Still, Mr. Agnesina does us an extraordinary service, first, in taking Collins seriously as a student and follower of Locke, and second, in demonstrating that the basis of his infamous exchanges with theologians was philosophical. Even his attack on scriptural authority and the priesthood originates in the argument that explanations are either reasonable or contrary to reason, but never above reason. The Boyle lectures make a good starting point, since the attempt to reconcile the new science with Christianity marks the century's fault line in terms of defending belief. Against the argument of James O'Higgins and others that whatever else Collins was, he was not an atheist, Mr. Agnesina posits the combined influence of Bayle, Spinoza, Toland, and Leibniz along with Lockean epistemology to argue he was indeed an atheist, although he resented Toland's blatancy, preferring his own subtleties. The distinction between contrary to reason and above reason was essential to scientist-theologians like Robert Boyle: God's knowledge and human knowledge were on very different planes. Locke understood this problem for religious belief, and hence defined what was above reason as matters of faith. However, faith had to withstand the test of reason, and the validity of testimony (testament) became determinative, exposing an exploitable vulnerability for John Toland and Pierre Bayle. Collins followed them with a series of essays in the Independent Whig (1732), arguing we cannot give rational assent to what we do not understand: "Men who trust in mysteries are of two types: 'learned Parrots and unlearned Parrots: to the first whereof, Absurdity is the peculiar Privilege; and to the latter, Ignorance."' Collins was, a point Mr. Agnesina stresses, a splendid rhetorician. The chapter on Collins's exchanges with Samuel Clarke is the most important in the book. From the early eighteenth century to the present, the issues seem much the same: "the emergence of thought, consciousness and personal identity, materialism." Whether the soul is material or immaterial moved these philosophical issues into the realm of theology, but Mr. Agnesina is astute in showing how Collins built his argument from Lockean premises. For Clarke, it was essential that the soul differ from matter; matter was compound and divisible, the soul, one and entire. Following Locke's argument that the soul is "superadded by God to organized matter," Collins extends the idea to argue that "consciousness is a property that arises from the complex organization of matter into textures, a property that the parts, taken individually, do not possess but that is present in the whole." Clarke rejects this: "the Individual Power of consciousness presupposes an Individual Being [End Page 115] which cannot be matter, because matter is subject to composition, whereas the soul or the consciousness, being individual, cannot be divisible in any way." Put otherwise, for Clarke, identity is in the soul; for Collins, as for Locke, it is in "the flow of consciousness." Underlying this debate is disagreement about materialism. Clarke is certain that in opposition to material substance ("not Self-existent, but Dependent, Finite, Divisible, Passive") there is an immaterial substance, which is "Self-existent, Eternal, Infinite." Collins responds that this requires demonstration, either that matter is not self-existent or that it came from nothing. Since neither is demonstrable, human knowledge must content itself with the "most coherent hypothesis," namely, a denial of dualism...

La autoridad de las Escrituras en la obra de John Locke: el problema de la prueba de la revelación tradicional

AbstractIn this paper we will study the way in which Scriptural revelation authority is sustained in the work of John Locke. First, we will show the recurrence and centrality of the Scriptural reference as a source of moral authority. Second, we will analyze the articulation proposed between revelation and reason. Finally, we will consider the coherence between the validity of rationalistic empiricism in the Lockean epistemology and the acceptation of a revelation’s undemonstrative proof in an empiric-rational way, supported on the divine provenance validated by the existence of miracles.Keywords: Locke, Reason, faith, Scriptures, Latitudinarianism, Skepticism.

“Contesting the Empire of Habit”: Habituation and Liberty in Lockean Education

Although John Locke's educational curriculum has traditionally been seen to aim at creating free citizens capable of independent thought, the centrality of habituation to his pedagogy has recently raised concerns that the Education is no more than “indoctrination” for compliant subjects. I argue here that by re-examining habituation in light of Locke's epistemology, we find that Locke's education does aim at freedom, but that this freedom requires a strong will and a cultivated skepticism. The habits which Locke asks parents to instill are aimed not at programming specific behavior and opinions, but rather at training children to “cross their desires” to strengthen their wills against the impositions of nature, custom, and fashion, which Locke argues pose an far more serious threat to independent thought than parental discipline. Locke's education aims to cultivate a skeptical mental disposition that permits individuals to resist these other sources of habit and to continually question and revise their own convictions.

Berkeley’s Lockean Religious Epistemology

Berkeley’s main aim in his well-known early works was to identify and refute “the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion.” This appears to place Berkeley within a well-established tradition of religious critics of Locke's epistemology, including, most famously, Stillingfleet. I argue that these appearances are deceiving. Berkeley is, in fact, in important respects an opponent of this tradition. According to Berkeley, Locke’s earlier critics, including Stillingfleet, had misidentified the grounds of irreligion in Locke’s philosophy while all the while endorsing the true grounds of irreligion themselves. Locke’s epistemology is innocent; matter and abstraction are to blame.

Lockean Social Epistemology

Locke's reputation as a sceptic regarding testimony, and the resultant mockery by epistemologists with social inclinations, is well known. In particular Michael Welbourne, in his article ‘The Community of Knowledge’ (1981), depicts Lockean epistemology as fundamentally opposed to a social conception of knowledge, claiming that he ‘could not even conceive of the possibility of a community of knowledge’. This interpretation of Locke is flawed. Whilst Locke does not grant the honorific ‘knowledge’ to anything short of certainty, he nonetheless held what we would call ‘testimonial knowledge’ in appropriate esteem. This can be shown by his careful distinction between testimony and mere received opinion. Furthermore, this distinction is dependent upon a knowledge community which enables hearers of testimony to access alternative accounts. In view of this, we can consider Locke's Conduct of the Understanding in a new light. Dedicated to the autodidact adult, The Conduct directs the learner to reason clearly and well. One goal is to render adult students capable of assessing testimony. The advice given is social in nature. The student must not limit his study to ‘one sort of men or one sort of books’. Otherwise, he faces the sort of cognitive isolation which would render him a mere receiver of opinion. The picture of Locke that emerges is not that of a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic regarding testimonial knowledge, but of a philosopher who formed an embryonic social epistemology embedded within a programme of adult education.

Difference and Enlightenment Violence: Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

This essay is a review of Daniel Carey's Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006).

Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractDisability studies approaches the British eighteenth century as a period in transition, with the conception of disability as spiritual sign of wonder or warning giving way to an understanding of it as pathology and abnormality. Period‐appropriate terms for disability are ‘deformity,’‘defect,’ and ‘monster,’ which were used for exotic bodily configurations and gender and racial differences: women and non‐Europeans were perceived as defective. John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Inchbald, and William Hay have generated interest on account of their disabilities, while Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Francis Burney, and William Godwin have received attention for disability thematics. Topics of concern include disability and old age, physiognomy in characterization, joke book humor and sensibility, ugliness as aesthetic category, defect in tropes of national identity, deafness and sign language, intellectual disability and Lockean epistemology, the exotic deformed, disfigurement from smallpox as well as political rhetoric associated with the disease, and femininity as monstrosity.

Deborah Madden, ‘A cheap, safe and natural medicine’: religion, medicine and culture in John Wesley’s Primitive physic, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Clio Medica 83, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 313, €65.00 (hardback 978-90-420-2274-4).

In the Preface to his immensely successful Primitive physic, John Wesley asked whether there were not too many books already on the art of medicine. His answer: “Yes, too many ten times over, considering how little to the purpose the far greater part of them speak.” Additionally, they were “too dear for poor men to buy, and too hard for plain men to understand”. As one who famously twinned the roles of pastor and physician, Wesley considered it his duty before God to assist the labouring poor, to ensure that, through his mediation, they had access to sound and affordable medical advice. In an impressive monograph, notable for the thoroughness with which the most recent secondary literature has been assimilated, Deborah Madden offers a systematic study of Wesley’s motivation and its grounding in his primitive Christianity. His prescriptions for fighting the diseases of his day, his advocacy of an austere preventive regimen, and his responsiveness both to criticism and to the latest medical innovations are presented as the products of a sincere, practical piety. Madden makes no secret of her intention to lift Wesley’s reputation by rescuing him from contemporaries who falsely accused him of quackery or who exaggerated his disrespect for professional physicians, to whose authority he frequently deferred. He has to be rescued, also, from historians who have accused him of making medicine too subject to theology, and, specifically, of conflating madness and demonic possession. One consequence of Madden’s rescue operation is that Wesley is instated as an exponent of Enlightenment culture rather than marginalized or excluded from it by his fideism. His sensitivity to environmental determinants of disease, his willingness (as with George Cheyne) to interpret the body mechanically, his empirical insistence that remedies must be tried and tested rather than deduced from conjectural theories are described as conforming to a Lockean epistemology that was also compatible with the neo-Hippocratic writings of Thomas Sydenham. Central to Madden’s argument is the claim that, despite the analogies Wesley drew between physical and spiritual healing, he regarded the two as separate, in the sense that the former addressed diseases of the flesh, the latter the life of the spirit. She insists that he did not confuse medicine with religion, did not suggest that health of body and soul were one and the same, and did not teach that the spiritual world could affect bodily organs. At first sight, this might seem to sit uncomfortably with another of her main contentions—namely that to understand Wesley we have to recognize his holistic understanding of the human subject, in which “theological abstraction and biological study were fused together in a dynamic and powerful way because he was fascinated by the full range of human existence” (p. 267). For Wesley there was a level at which religion and medicine were fused. Thus he shared with Cheyne the view that the most remarkable rules for preserving life and health were at the same time moral duties commanded by the author of nature. He also had no doubt that bodily disorders could be caused and influenced by a person’s state of mind. Indeed, one of the real strengths of Madden’s analysis is her identification of the several levels at which Wesley’s eclectic theology did shape his medical priorities, even if the connections were largely invisible in his text. His understanding of the Fall lay behind his description of the earth as “one great infirmary”. Salvation itself was a form of healing. The simple life he advocated, in protest against the debilitating indulgences of his age, was precisely what the imitation of Christ required. The instilling of hope into a patient resonated with the larger eschatological hope of a future life, grounded ultimately in Christ’s resurrection. There were connections, too, with the natural theology that Wesley articulated more fully in his Survey of the wisdom of God in the creation: medical intervention was the re-tuning of a machine that had been wonderfully made. Despite these and other interconnections that Madden finds in his sermons, she is surely correct, in principle, to say that, at the crucial level of treating specific diseases, Wesley’s eyes could be, and were, focused on the natural, not the supernatural. By carefully tracing his many theological and medical sources, and by devoting an entire chapter to an assessment of his therapies (including his minority enthusiasm for electrification), she largely succeeds in portraying him as more a representative of the English Enlightenment than a deluded dilettante. By her own admission, however, there are issues she has preferred not to engage, such as Wesley’s interest in both faith healing and the miraculous. How the rectification of that omission, and even Wesley’s belief in the efficacy of prayer (which he described as “that medicine of medicines”), might qualify her reappraisal is perhaps a nice question.

The flow of Influence : from Newton to Locke.. and Back

- In this essay, the affinity between Locke's empiricism and Newton's natural philosophy is scrutinized. Parallels are distinguished from influences. I argue, pace G.A.J. Rogers, that Newton's doctrine of absolute space and time influenced Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (first edition: 1689, though bearing the year 1690 on its cover) from the second edition onwards. I also show that Newton used Lockean terminology in his criticism of Cartesianism. It is further argued that Locke's endorsement of corpuscularianism is merely methodological, i.e. he accepts it as a scientifically useful and psychologically intelligible paradigm, but not as a realist explanation of rerum natura. Like Newton, Locke was reluctant to accept the corpuscular theory of light. However, his reasons for doing so were different from those of Newton. This essay is divided into three parts: in the first, the stage is set by looking at the fundamentals of Locke's epistemology; in the second, several correspondences between Locke's and Newton's thought are explored and two cases of influence are argued for; and in the third, several arguments are provided for interpreting Locke's corpuscularianism as methodological.

ROGER WOOLHOUSE. Locke: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pp. xviii, 528. $39.99

Roger Woolhouse has written a fine new comprehensive biography of John Locke. Although Locke's political, economic, educational, and religious works were extremely important and influential, Locke was proudest of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). It is therefore appropriate that this biography is by a philosopher, and that it is at its best in clear, concise, and elegant analyses of Locke's epistemology, while providing good if brief analyses of all of Locke's major works. By discussing the contents of the huge volume of papers and journals composed by Locke, Roger Woolhouse illuminates much about the intellectual origins of many of Locke's major works. A particularly fine sense is communicated of Locke's deep pragmatic interests in natural philosophy and medicine, and of their significant roles in his epistemology. The importance of issues of trade to Locke is delineated, leading to Locke's late in life lament that his head belonged “to a...

The Moral in Phutatorius's Breeches: Tristram Shandy and the Limits of Stoic Ethics

The Moral in Phutatorius’s Breeches:Tristram Shandy and the Limits of Stoic Ethics Brian Michael Norton (bio) At first glance, the improbable accident involving the piping-hot chestnut and the aperture in Phutatorius's breeches might seem to be a peripheral event in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Phutatorius, after all, is a minor character in the novel, and the entire episode is narrated in three brief chapters. Yet we should be wary of dismissing any of Sterne's "sunshiny" digressions, especially one that concerns this particular piece of anatomy. Given the monstrous wound Uncle Toby received at Namur, as well as Tristram's own mishap with the sash-window, Phutatorius's misadventure warrants special attention. This scene offers a condensed and highly detailed look at the relation between the Shandean subject and the external world, an issue that has preoccupied philosophical readings of Tristram Shandy since John Traugott, fifty years ago, observed the "ontological vast abrupt, the abysm between ideas and reality" in the novel. 1 This scholarship, though diverse in philosophical and critical orientation, has tended to frame the issue in similar ways. Taking Sterne's references to Locke as a point of departure, these critics not only see the novelist as a [End Page 405] perceptive and creative reader of the philosopher, but suggest that Tristram Shandy, like Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), explores more fully the epistemological implications of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) than Locke himself seemed willing to do: if we can never get around the screen of our own sensory impressions, how can we ever be sure our ideas are accurate reflections of what exists outside the mind? And given this isolation, how can ideas in one mind faithfully be communicated to the mind of another? 2 This scholarship has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the philosophical ideas at play in Sterne's novel. Collectively, however, it has also worked to overstate the novel's interest in matters of epistemology. The reading I am proposing here re-examines the relation between the perceiving subject and the object of perception as an ethical problem, and suggests that the thematic focus of Tristram Shandy has less to do with the epistemological question of how accurately our ideas reflect reality than with the ethical one of how they affect our ability to bear it. 3 Because ours is a world of squeaky hinges and swiftly falling sash-windows, the good life must always be a long shot. But the novel as a whole never loses sight of the project, sharing in Walter Shandy's persistent fascination with the "secret springs" and "hidden resources" by which the "mind is enabled to stand it out, and bear itself up" against such overwhelming forces. 4 Indeed, Tristram Shandy itself is born out of this struggle: just as Tristram seeks as an author to "counterbalance" the many misfortunes that have befallen him as a man, Sterne's own dedication at the beginning of volume 1 [End Page 406] enlists the book in his effort to "fence against" the minor evils of daily living and add "something to this Fragment of Life." The Phutatorius episode provides a case study for examining this dynamic, revealing the novel's opposition of mind and world to be as informed by Stoic ethics as by Lockean epistemology. That arguably the most successful exponent of sensibility of the period would be enticed by the ethical possibilities of Stoicism may sound unlikely. But the values of affective sentiment and Stoic impassiveness were in no way incompatible in eighteenth-century thought, as is evident in the works of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to cite a few examples. My argument in this article, at any rate, is not that the Anglican priest was secretly a Stoic, but that this scene adopts a specifically Stoic framework to work through the possibilities and limitations of living well on this "scurvy and disastrous" planet (1:8). This, to be sure, is a decidedly unorthodox Stoicism, in which Epictetan thought mingles promiscuously with Montaignean subjectivism, empiricist psychology, and Christian doctrine. What this strange episode essentially...

John Locke's politics of moral consensus

1. 'Reason teaches all mankind, who will but consult it': John Locke and moral consensus 2. 'Sit down in quiet ignorance': Locke's epistemology of limits 3. 'The candle of the Lord': Locke's rational faith 4. 'The only foundation of faith': reasonable Christianity 5. 'The only true touchstone of moral rectitude': the religious foundations of morality 6. Tis reasonable to think the cause is natural': Locke's religious eudemonism 7. 'The servants of one sovereign master': authority and moral consensus 8. 'The opinion of this or that philosopher was of no authority': Locke and us.

Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel by Thomas Keymer Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson by Fred Parker (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2??5 785 implicitly critical of the 'tendency of economic analysis to abstain from [. . .] moral evaluation' (p. 232), and one of the strengths of the book is its alertness to the ethical issues raised by the texts under discussion. King's College London Warren Chernaik Sterne, theModerns, and theNovel. By Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002. xiv + 222pp. ?47. ISBN 0-19-924592-4. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. By Fred Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. x + 290pp. ?50. ISBN o19 -925328-8. Both Thomas Keymer and Fred Parker have written 'source studies', though their books have little in common besides a reading of Laurence Sterne. Parker's Scepticism and Literature proves true to its subtitle by emulating the loosely discursive nature of the traditional essay form. Parker writes a thoroughly untheoretical ifnot unsystematic study of 'sceptical thinking' in four eighteenth-century authors, whose models are Montaigne and Locke. In Sterne, theModerns, and theNovel Thomas Keymer draws upon theories of intertextuality in order to argue that Tristram Shandy is very much a part of the popular literary,political, and social culture of its own day. Parker's study is focused on what Keymer calls 'positivist claims about "influence"' (p. 11), while Keymer explores the 'hypotexts' or 'aleatory' networks of influence and allusion. Even though Keymer's study is more narrowly focused than Parker's (one genre, one author, one novel), his historicist approach produces more general knowledge about eighteenth-century culture than Parker's does. Parker's study of scepticism features much finewriting about Locke, Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Working through close readings of major texts, Parker argues that Locke's epistemology limits the quest for general truths and that Montaigne's Essays instruct his readers to 'live according to nature' (p. 39) by enacting the author's 'intellectual helplessness' (p. 37). Parker trains a keen eye on the 'paradox of irony' in his four authors to show their debts to Locke and Montaigne and to argue that 'scepti? cism generates understanding' (p. 30), by which he means practical knowledge rather than rational certainty. In some of these authors this practical knowledge seems very near a sentiment from Rochester's Satyr: 'Our Sphere of Action, is lifes happiness, | And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass.' If their practical knowledge never becomes the foundation for the Epicurean creed found in Rochester, it is thanks to either religion or the age's refinement. Parker's readings portray a group of authors who take their motto fromthe opening of Epistle II of Pope's Essay on Man: 'With too much knowledge forthe Sceptic side, | With too much weakness forthe Stoic's pride | [They] hang between' rationalism and scepticism, ideation and experience, stability and flux,philosophy and backgammon, solipsism and sociality, system and spontaneity, conclusiveness and doubt. Rather than let 'dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind', they embrace a dynamic commit? ment to thought. When thinking does not provide them with intellectual comfort, they have recourse to other solutions. Hume's answer to the pain of doubt is 'estab? lished custom and convention, [. . .] the eighteenth-century game of polite society' (p. 163). When Pope is not resting comfortably with fideism in his Essay ('Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; | Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore!'), he is taking pleasure in flapping a degenerate society's darlings. Sterne, as has long been noted, takes his pleasure in the ambiguous gesture, in the hand that reaches out in the darkness to find a friend or define an end. In Johnson, Parker finds a need for certainty, a 'horror at finality' (p. 240), and 786 Reviews a 'stressful moral urgency' (p. 248) that distinguishes him from the other writers of the study. As Parker reads through the Idler and Rasselas, however, he argues that Johnson finds his relief in 'open-endedness [. . .] an ironic understanding of the moralist and the sceptic as in necessary, perpetual dialogue' (p. 266). In his drive to reach conclusions about hanging between scepticism and stoicism, Parker underestimates the psychological cost of finding existential solutions to the feltneed for certainty, and thus underestimates the intensity of Johnson...

What is modern in Locke's account of substance

In this paper Locke's account of substance is interpreted. Locke analyzes different meanings of the notion of substance, the origin of the ideas of substances and problems concerning their justification and function within our knowledge. Two meanings of the notion of substance appear to be most important and at the same time confronted with each other: the complex idea of substance and the idea of substratum. Bennett's claim that Locke didn't decide whether to keep or discard the idea of substratum is refuted. Locke discards only the scholastic concept of substratum as an indeterminate support in which accidents inhere, due to its inutility as an explanatory model. The idea of substratum is kept because it is indispensable for explanation of the necessary coexistence of simple ideas in complex idea of substance. This feature differentiates ideas of substances from ideas of mixed modes. The importance of this distinction in Locke's epistemology validates the use of the idea of substratum. Ayers' claim that Locke identifies ontologically substratum and real essence is confirmed. But, it is claimed that this identification cannot be applied to the issues of origin and justification of these ideas. In the course of the interpretation it is shown that Locke's account of substance is modern insofar as it contains anticipations of Berkeley's, Hume's and Kant's arguments and claims, as well as contemporary philosophical topics such as multiple realizability explanatory gap and logico-linguistic argumentation.

BEFORE THE ROOSTER CROWS: THE BETRAYAL OF KNOWLEDGE IN MODERNITY1

In this paper I compare the gendered epistemology of John Locke and Margaret Fell as representatives of a choice between life and death in early modernity. Locke's epistemology, based on ideals of putative neutrality and objectivity and disturbed by 'enthusiasts', became the model of knowledge in modernity. I show, however, that it is premised upon death. Not only does it take objects (rendered lifeless by the removal of God from the world) as the paradigm for knowledge; but it also renders the process of knowing itself as calculation rather than sympathy. I show that in the writings of'enthusiasts', in particular the Quaker Margaret Fell, a life-giving and life-affirming knowledge was offered, but that it was heavily repressed by Locke and his fellows both in terms of gender and in terms of its (related) understanding of the divine, so that modernity was structured upon a gesture of death.

Culture de la nature au XVIIIe siècle : le sens dans le jardin

The art of gardening stems from an ontological paradox whereby man as creature turns into a creator using nature for his own ends and perfecting it. In this sense the development of landscape gardening in the XVIIIth century signals the advent of man as master of nature. The paradox is tentatively solved when another sort of nature is put forward by idealist thinkers who try to promote intellectualist aesthetics to explain how nature can be naturalised, i.e. rendered more natural through the application of intellectual archetypes to the raw materials of landscape. The gardener of the late XVIIth and early XVIIIth centuries thus becomes the agent whose role is to bring nature to perfection through the application of culture. This first paradox is complemented and inverted by a second owing to the success of sensualist aesthetics in the age of the Enlightenment. The development of Locke's epistemology is characterised by the emergence of sentiment as a faculty of judgment whose decisions supersede reason in when they are seen as the expression of the voice of a nature now conceived of as predominantly interior. From Shaftesbury to Gilpin's or Price's picturesque gardens, an interior landscape appears which shows the mastery of the master of nature effected by this new interior nature. Eventually, nature wins as, following the winding path that leads from intellectual sense to sensualist sentiment, it invades the representations and the very nature of the gardener.