Locke's Ideas Research Articles

Generations of Reason: A Family's Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England

Generations of Reason: A Family's Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England

5·18시민군의 활동에 대한 법철학적 연구

The May-18 Citizen Militia, as a good-willed vigilante corps armed to resist the evil governmental authority after the mass firing of martial law forces on May 21, 1980, realized a peaceful world called Dae-dong-se-sang (or the wholly equalized one) for 5 days from the 22nd until the 26th of the month and publicized the New-Army Group's crime of destroying the constitutional order and Gwangju citizens' dedicated efforts around the world through the Final Resistance. This paper specifies the spirit of May 18 Demonstration Movement by examining the vigilante activities of the militia and illuminates its precious value in the light of Thomas Hobbes's and John Locke's philosophical idea on the relationship between governmental authority and people’s resistance right. As a research method, the discourse of vigilantism is applied to the formation and activities of the militia, and their vigilantism activities are studied in terms of legal philosophy. In the process, this research explains the rationale of exercising the governmental power by the idea of Hobbes' Leviathan and illuminates the legitimacy of the militia's activities of vigilantism by Locke's theory of governance. And also, it argues the value of studying the militia's formation and activities by confirming the contact points with Locke's idea through reinterpreting Hobbes's thought. Lastly, this study defines the 5·18 spirit as sovereignty vested in the people, vigilant resistance, Dae-dong-se-sang, the idea of human rights, and protection of democracy and expects that legal philosophical considerations integrating historical fact research and political interpretation will contribute to the investigation of the facts of May 18 Demonstration Movement and the commemoration and succession of the event.

John Locke's Concept of Justice

The article explores the main ideas of the concept of justice by John Locke, one of the most prominent representatives of the social and political philosophy of Modern times. The article considers the contractual theory of the origin of the state and the concept of justice in the context of the relevance of the realities of the modern world. D. Locke's concept of justice is investigated in the light of the enrichment of this problem. The author considers D. Locke's views as a reflection of the realities of social life of this era and tries to identify in them ideas that can be used in the realization of justice in modern society. The author explores D. Locke's concept of justice from the point of view of a materialistic understanding of history, the unity of various spheres of public life, the relationship of causal and functional relationships, in the context of the dialectic of economics and politics, from the point of view of the relationship and interdependence of needs, interests and moral values. The concept of D. Locke is considered as a pronounced contractual theory. The socio-political views of D. Locke in the light of the concept of justice seem interesting and original. The concept of D. Locke has its merits, for example, the position on the priority of the idea of the public good over the private selfish interests of an individual, the position on the need to correspond to the mind of individual interests and freedom. The unconditional merits in his research can be attributed to the further enrichment of contractual theory, his interpretation of the concept of fair equality and property rights. This interpretation was a reflection of new historical realities. D. Locke's ideas remain relevant in the context of modern socio-political realities and require further research.

Heidegger’s Unlikely Alliance with Locke in Identifying Truth and Knowledge

The paper examines Heidegger's notions of truth and knowledge in the context of Locke's theory of same. It argues that when Heidegger's expositions of "primordial truth" and knowledge as a "retainment of assertion" are analyzed in their Beings, new and improved definitions emerge which support Locke's ideas of truth and knowledge. It shows that Heidegger's primordial truth is the process which uncovers Locke's propositional truth and on which any knowledge must be based. Wherefrom, to solve the problem of what knowledge is and how one defines it, one must start with Heidegger's conceptions of truth and knowledge.

Metaphysical Foundations of the Idea of Tolerance in John Locke's Philosophy

In this paper we will try to identify the concrete ways in which John Locke describes the limits of toleration between different types of faith and its metaphysical foundations.
 From the beginning of his text A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke specifies that toleration is, first and foremost, a practical ideal and, secondly, a moral one. As such, toleration must be the essential feature of the true Church because in the field of religious faith any claimed superiority is in fact only the expression of the struggle for power and domination. A theoretical perspective on the idea of religious toleration is also recalled from Lockeˈs radical empiricism, which correlates man's identity with his appearance at birth, for the first time in the world, as a different form from others. Such a view is contrary to metempsychosis which could lead to innate ideas in the human soul about moral principles and especially about God, as Plato or Descartes believed.
 Starting from the principles of toleration, John Locke's idea was to find those elements through which a fundamental separation between the Church and the State could be achieved. But toleration ceases when the Church and the State merge discreetly until they can no longer distinguish the boundaries between them.
 We consider that the fundamental principle of religious toleration is based on the idea of reciprocity, i.e. toleration-to-toleration and intolerance-to-intolerance, as Locke stated. This principle is also an essential landmark for a moral law on religious toleration in the contemporary, global world.

The Notion of Identity in the Philosophy of John Locke: Through the Influences of Religion Ideas

John Locke is one of the key figures in the history of early modern philosophy. He had a great influence on the development of philosophy, which is based on the empirical method, and on the political systems of countries. And even though his works have not been deprived of attention, some questions of his philosophy remain insufficiently disclosed. The author's deals with the religious turn in studies of John Loke. Attention is paid to the role of religion in the philosophy of the thinker. The issue of religious influences on the issue of identity is being discussed. The essence of the term “modern” is highlighted and the criteria according to which John Locke's ideas should be considered modern are indicated. The author notes that some researchers considered John Locke one of the founders of modern philosophy, while others believed that the role of the English philosopher in the development of modern philosophy was overestimated. A characteristic feature of modern philosophy is the emphasis on research and exploration. The author names the identity of John Locke a subjective identity. The main attributes of identity are: reflection, consciousness and memory. Self-reflection and meaningful self-perception allows each person to choose their own way of worshiping God. Consciousness allows a person to evaluate his actions, forms an idea of morality, the concept of sin and so on. The article deals with different meanings of the concept of identity in the religious and secular aspects. The difference - is in memory. Personal responsibility is an integral part of identity. The author of the article notes that we should make a difference between responsibility in religious and political field. Religious responsibility requires observance not only of legal law, but also of moral rules and biblical commandments.

What the Women of Dublin Did with John Locke

AbstractWilliam Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. TheEssay Concerning Human Understandingwas placed on the curriculum of Trinity College in 1692, soon after its publication. Yet there has been very little discussion of whether Irish women from this period read or knew Locke's work, or engaged more generally in contemporary philosophical debate. This essay focuses on the work of Laetitia Pilkington (1709–1750) and Mary Barber (1685–1755), two of the Dublin women writers of the so-called ‘Triumfeminate’, a literary and intellectual circle connected to Jonathan Swift which met and discussed ideas at the home of Patrick Delaney. Pilkington and Barber were particularly influenced by Locke's ideas on obstetrics and childhood in hisSome Thoughts Concerning Educationand especially by his discussion of memory in theEssay Concerning Human Understanding. Both authors engage playfully and imaginatively with Locke's theories, especially in a domestic context. Not all philosophical debates took place in the public male spaces of school, coffee house and university. This essay attempts to recreate the contexts in which intellectually curious women of the ‘middling sort’ encountered and engaged with philosophical ideas, especially those of Locke, and how these shaped their writing.

A Factory Afield: Capitalism and Empire in John Locke's Political Economy

Since the 1950s, interpreters of John Locke have debated whether his ideas about political economy figured among the intellectual sources of capitalist development. While some have labeled Locke a mercantile or agrarian “capitalist thinker,” others have insisted that, although a mercantilist, he was in no sense a theorist of capitalism. By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, foreign trade, and labor discipline throughout the 1690s as a reflection of the historical rise of export-oriented cycles of commodity manufacturing in the English countryside known as “proto-industrialization.” Moreover, I claim that, because proto-industrialization was tied to the expansion of England's colonial economy, this neglected context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I argue that Locke pursued proto-industrial economic reform by combining a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress with an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and exchange that favored metropolitan trade.

Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body by Han-Kyul Kim

Reviewed by: Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body by Han-Kyul Kim Shelley Weinberg Han-Kyul Kim. Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xiv + 166. Cloth, $112.00. In the brief space I have, I can provide only a quick taste of what the reader is in for with Han-Kyul Kim's Locke's Ideas of Mind and Body. Kim argues that his account of Locke's metaphysics of substance in terms of ideas of mind and body (nominal essences) makes sense of the relation between four crucial and often overlooked topics in Locke's philosophy: "(1) Locke's mind-body nominalism, (2) his epistemic humility, (3) his functionalist account of substrata, and (4) his naturalist approach to the human mind" (4). Kim opens in chapter 1 with a survey of various ontological doctrines (materialism, substance dualism, and property dualism) that have been associated with Locke and provides arguments that none are correct. Instead, Kim puts forward a novel argument that Locke's metaphysics of substance should be understood in functional terms. Qualities are explained and known, insofar as we know them, in terms of their causal/functional roles: any intrinsic natures should be understood simply as possibly multi-realizable bearers of those causal roles. This dovetails with Kim's understanding of Locke's "substance nominalism" (chapter 2), the view that the distinction between the mental and the material (mind and body) is only a nominal (ideational) one reflecting our two different perspectives on the world given in sensation and reflection. So, "the two nominal entities [mind and body] are differentiated only by reference to their functional roles in our psychological and physical theories," both of which should be understood in a naturalistic framework (131). Consistent also with Locke's "epistemic humility," the subject of chapter 3, any claim about the fundamental stuff of the universe—that it is either material, immaterial, or something with both material and immaterial properties—confuses "ideas with reality" (9). Shedding light on this confusion between ideas and reality allows Kim to see in Locke a kind of naturalism consistent with an "emergentist" interpretation of superaddition (chapter 4): everything from motion to thinking emerges as something more than the material particles so organized and "made fit" by God for that emergence. Higher-level beings "may thus appear to be entirely distinct from and over and above the solid particles of which they are composed, but are nevertheless described as 'superadded' only in the sense that they are not contained in the idea of matter" (89). Such confusion between what belongs to the realm of ideas and what belongs to reality also leads to the perennial "mind-body problem" for which a solution is offered in chapter 5. Following Colin McGinn, Consciousness and Its Objects (Clarendon Press, 2004), Kim argues that once we realize that all Lockean talk about material or immaterial substance is really only about our ideas (nominal essences) and that it takes a being far superior to us to organize the fundamental stuff in such a way [End Page 818] that it exhibits the causal order it does, part of which results in the nominal essences (ideas) of matter and thinking, we should realize that mind-body interaction as problematic is due simply to the way we think about the mind and the body. A superior understanding of the natural world would reveal some property, in terms of its functional role, that would "enable us to see a priori how the phenomena we call 'mental' and 'physical' are related to each other" (112). In crafting his functionalist and "substance nominalist" interpretation of Locke, Kim has provided interesting links to various historical (William Carroll, Richard Burthogge) and contemporary (Colin McGinn) "Spinozist" readings of Locke as well as a historical naturalist reading (Joseph Priestley) that have not been in the foreground for some time. He also appeals to twentieth- and twenty-first-century metaphysics of the mind (Frank Ramsey, Jaegwon Kim, Donald Davidson, Colin McGinn) to shed more light on various arguments. Some may object to doing the history of philosophy by appeal to contemporary thinking. I think Kim has done a good job of allowing Locke...

Providential Deism, Divine Reason, and Locke's Educational Theory

This essay uses Charles Taylor's recent description of secularity to rethink an important historical example of the relation among religion, reason, and education. Locating Locke's educational theory in the historical period that Taylor calls providential deism, the article suggests that Locke's idea of good education, namely, moving students to follow the dictates of reason alone, cannot proceed without two related features of reason, its infallibility and its inherent attractiveness. These two, but especially the latter give reason a transcendent if not divine status, akin to Providential grace. The article claims that this not only gives education a central role in society's improvement, but it challenges Taylor's claim that Providential deism is an eclipse of grace. It does so by arguing that in this transition Providential grace comes in the form of reason's inherent attractiveness and that good education is key to expose students to this inherent attractiveness of reason.

Locke, natural law and civil peace: Reply to Tate

In this comment, I reply to two objections John Tate raises against my discussion of the trajectory of Locke's ideas on toleration (in an earlier article published in EJPT, ‘Locke’s Tracts and the Anarchy of the Religious Conscience’) Tate maintains that I misunderstand the role of natural law and civil peace in Locke's thought. I defend my interpretation of the role of natural law and show that Tate is mistaken in his claim that Locke's concern to preserve civil peace conflicted with his separate concern to protect individual rights.

Personhood in El Criticón by Baltasar Gracián: How to Become a Complete Man

El Criticon by Baltasar Gracian is more than just the literary venture of a philosopher; it is the result of the reflections and ideas presented in his prior works. This essay analyses El Criticon in accordance with the theoretical reflections on language and ingenium made in Agudeza y arte de ingenio and shows how the concept of persona emerges from the pages of El Criticon and moves from being the particular story of Andrenio and Critilo to becoming a universal theory of personhood. It studies Gracian's concept of persona in a philosophical perspective and compares it to the Cartesian cogito and Locke's idea of personal identity.

John Locke and Post-Revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise*

Our perception of John Locke's ideas and significance has undergone profound change in the last forty years. Once assumed to have been a justification of the revolution of 1688, his Two Treatises are now located amongst the radical Whig writings of the late 1670s or early 1680s.1 Alongside the redating there has been a fundamental re-evaluation of the work's impact. As Mark Goldie puts it, ‘where Locke was once assumed to be the ineluctable fountain of political wisdom, he has now come to have an elusive and fugitive presence’.2 John Kenyon, Martyn Thompson, Harry Dickinson, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock have all questioned or minimized the influence that Locke's political ideology had, both at the time of its publication and throughout much of the eighteenth century.3 The effect of marginalizing Locke's political discourse has changed our historical emphasis, so that Locke's political influence after the revolution of 1688 has appeared slight. Against this, however, something of a backlash has developed. Mark Goldie, Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith have all offered important evidence about the pre-revolution Locke and about the textual impact of his work;4 while Michael Zuckert's ‘new republicanism’ seeks to locate Locke much closer to the commonwealthsmen who influenced America.5 And it was long ago established that Locke and his friends, whom he called his ‘college’, played an active and highly visible role in lobbying, policy-development and drafting legislation in the 1690s.6 This article builds on the second of these interpretations, which resists attempts to marginalize Locke, and seeks to expand our understanding of that post-revolutionary activity.

Anglo-French cultural transmission: the case of John Locke and the Huguenots*

This article purports to open windows onto the world of cultural transmission by offering a case study on the Huguenots who worked on the translation of Locke's texts and ideas into French at the turn of the eighteenth century. After arguing that there was, at that time, a threefold cultural necessity to translate English books into French, the article shows how Locke's translators rose to the challenge. It argues that through their bricolage, they were responsible for colouring and shaping Locke's texts and ideas, and concludes that they played a fundamental but overlooked role in setting the tone and orientation of the Enlightenment debates generated by the discussion of Locke's ideas. This article emphasizes the fact that the Anglo-French cultural transmission of Locke's ideas was a two-way exchange and invites historians to pay more attention to the adaptation of texts and ideas as they pass from one language to another.

Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher , and: Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher, and: Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry David Krasner Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth. Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2008. 432 pp. $45.00. Lauri Ramey . Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 197 pp. $69.95. Alain L. Locke (1886-1954) was an influential and brilliant interlocutor of the New Negro/ Harlem Renaissance Movement. Harvard graduate (both undergraduate and Ph.D.), Rhodes scholar, Howard University professor for four decades, polymath, and prolific writer on a capacious range of subjects, he is primarily known for editing the widely acclaimed "Bible" of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, Locke mentored dozens of artists and authors. He was, in his words, the "midwife" of mid-twentieth-century black intellectualism. Yet his role as philosopher has often been ignored, and until now, no biography has existed. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth have done a tremendous service with this largely superb biography. They have put Locke in perspective, giving him his rightful due without falsely exaggerating his importance. In addition to describing the details of his life, Harris and Molesworth focus on Locke's philosophy: advocacy of pluralism; insistence on relativism concerning race relations; emphasis on social democracy; concepts of "value"; and aesthetic ideas. For Locke, all of these facets were interrelated: pluralism was based on what he called "cultural reciprocity," the concept that every culture has exchangeable "value," and it is through the reciprocal exchange of ideas via education and especially the arts that democracy can flourish. According to Harris and Molesworth, Locke's pedigree was nurtured by his mother. While educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Berlin, he was exposed to many cultures, which influenced his notion that all cultures have value and that these values are exchangeable. In his search for philosophic roots, Locke developed the concept of cosmopolitanism: a network of ideas based on harmony, tolerance, and critical inquiry of other cultures. This cosmopolitanism provided "the core of Locke's ideas [with] the need for 'cultural reciprocity' and his special sense of multiculturalism, which he would spend the next several decades developing and promulgating" (76). As a philosopher, he believed that values are fungible, contextual, and multifaceted. For Locke, "cultural reciprocity," write the authors, "increases understanding between peoples and aids in the elimination of oppressive stereotypes and destructive feelings of group or racial supremacy" (93). Influenced by anthropologist Franz Boas, sociologist Georg Simmel, American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, the value philosophies of Alexius Meinong and Josiah Royce, and W. E. B. Du Bois's theories of race relations, Locke shaped his philosophical ideas. Values for him are interpretative rather than empirical; facts are important, but data alone cannot tell the whole story. The emphasis on values formed the core of his race theory. According to Harris and Molesworth, Locke averred that "there is no scientific basis for race or racism"; that "the cultures of people were complex and hybrid historical phenomena"; and that he "did not accept the idea that races were permanent" (122). Locke was a moderate in his views; he did not subscribe to racial separation, but he did recognize group contributions in art and culture. Locke, write Harris and Molesworth, "believed that group identity was inevitable, and the only way to manage it was to make it possible to have groups offer reciprocal tolerance to each other and for each to encapsulate its values into a representative type" (125). The authors further stress that "Having embraced pluralism in terms of values and eliminated any scientific basis for racial distinctions, Locke concluded that one could speak of Negro culture only as a composite of racial, national, and regional idioms" (339). [End Page 759] If there are faults with this book's account, they consist in the insufficient details concerning Locke's pivotal role in American pragmatism and African American drama. The authors tell us that John Dewey's work "would become central to the courses Locke taught in philosophy at Howard" (38); that Locke's key 1935 philosophical essay "Values and Imperatives...

‘Human understanding’ in imagining and organising sound: some implications of John Locke's Essay for ecological, cognitive and embodied approaches to composition

AbstractWe discuss John Locke's ideas in his essay of 1690 on sound and its cognition and relation to bodily motion. The ideas have interesting implications for the construction of organised sound. We argue that our ecological and statistical experience of sounds in our natural (and man-made) environment is in several respects critical for our choices as soundsmiths and our impressions as listeners. Sonic repetition, both sensory and imag(in)ed, contributes to that environment. Input sounds may be ‘coupled’ to output sounds; and in some cases the physical processes generating sound and the cognitive processes of receiving them are joined. As music technologists we may think of the computer, our sonic vehicle, as a joined bodily sonic-prosthesis. ‘Simple’ sonic ideas may associate with each other through shared biological bases, and become tools for creation of ‘complex’ ideas, as Locke cogitates. Furthermore, we now have new routes towards such complex sounds, including our computer prostheses.

Reconciling Locke's Definition of Knowledge with Knowing Reality

A common criticism of Locke's ideational definition of knowledge is that it contradicts his accounts of knowledge's reality and sensitive knowledge. Here it is argued that the ideational definiton of knowledge is compatible with knowledge of idea-independent reality. The key is Locke's notion of the signification. Nominal agreements obtain if and only if the ideas' descriptive contents are the ground for truth; real agreements obtain only if their total denotation are the grounds for truth. The signification of the ideas determine whether they denote real or fantastical objects. Three types of ideas, simple quality-ideas, modal ideas, and relational ideas, necessarily signify real objects. The fourth type, the ideas of substances, are real only if those particular combinations of qualitites have been perceived to co-exist. Locke's ideas are intrinsically either real or fantastical and thus, it is argued, his models of truth and knowledge's reality are far from typical correspondence theories.

Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty

It is proper for more reasons than the most obvious one that I should open this talk by quoting a former President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Lord Quinton, whose works on political philosophy I have so much enjoyed—and learnt from.In a chapter on political philosophy, which he contributed to the Oxford History of Western Philosophy, Lord Quinton says that ‘the effect of the importation of Locke's doctrines in to France was much like that of alcohol in an empty stomach’. In Britain, Lord Quinton adds, Locke's principles ‘served to endorse a largely conservative revolution against absolutist innovation’, whereas in France the importation of Locke's ideas would lead to the radicalism of the French revolution. Why was this so?

Artists and Culture: Empowering the Former to Foster the Latter

Neither side of the intellectual property debate can define what is best for culture or society. Instead, an artist's control over her work, enforced by intellectual property rights, allows culture to spread and thrive. It isn't necessary for self-appointed defenders of culture to decide what is in the best interests of the artist. Furthermore, digital delivery of content should not dilute the rights of artists. Citing the history of intellectual property law, and the subsequent flourish of culture in the U.S., illustrates that giving artists a limited monopoly on their work encourages future creation. In the U.S., our views and laws on intellectual property stem from philosophers of physical property. William Blackstone, heavily influenced by John Locke's idea of property as an inalienable right, first gave us the concept of the Blackstonian bundle, an idea vital to intellectual property. The Blackstonian bundle compares individual property rights to a bundle of sticks, which can be leased sold, traded or given away. Culture has thrived even as artists alternately extended and withheld sticks from their Blackstonian bundle. The copyright debate has gathered momentum with the widespread adoption of the Internet to distribute content. However for respected scholars to argue that depriving a creator of potential revenue for her work is harmless to the artist shows a true disrespect to all artists, and a dangerous compulsion to put the desires of the masses ahead of the rights of the individual. Instead, the Internet has created an increase in niche markets because of the falling cost of distribution and production of online content. Therefore, creators of specialized content now have the ability to profit from their work.

Discourses of Resistance in the American Revolution

Debates over whether the discourse used to justify resistance during the American Revolution was "liberal" or "republican" often obscure the more central question of why and how early American thinkers were able to combine strands of political thought that many modern scholars find contradictory. The arguments the Americans used to justify resistance are better understood as falling into four types that were not understood to be mutually exclusive: Lockean, Biblical, legal/historical, and republican. Locke's ideas often provided an organizing framework within which the other types of argument were used.