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2015, The Monist
Catharine Trotter Cockburn is best known for her _Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding_ (1702). However very little has been said about Trotter’s treatment of Locke’s metaphysical commitments therein. In this paper I give a brief description of the history of Trotter’s _Defence_. Thereafter I focus on two (of the many) objections to which Trotter responds on Locke’s behalf: 1) the objection that Locke has not proved the soul immortal, and 2) the objection that Locke’s view leads to the absurd consequence that our souls are in constant flux. I argue that Trotter offers a compelling response to both of these charges. This is not only because of what Trotter explicitly claims in the _Defence_, but also because the _Defence_ invites and encourages the reader to return to Locke’s text. I then argue that in Trotter we find additional insights and clarifications once we move past the two objections I just mentioned, and on to the related topic of personal identity. In this short paper I am not able to offer a full explication or evaluation of Trotter’s treatment of Locke’s metaphysical commitments. I am, however, able to show that this aspect of Trotter’s _Defence_ warrants careful consideration and further study.
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2017, Philosophy Study
Although excluded from the standard account of the history of philosophy, Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749) avoided the 17th-century bias against female intellectual skills and was an active contributor to the early modern philosophical discourse. In her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay (1702), she defended Locke from several criticisms by Thomas Burnet (1635-1715). By analysing three of Burnet’s main arguments, such as the theory of natural conscience, his anti-voluntarism, and his belief in the immateriality of the soul, Trotter showed that he often misinterpreted John Locke’s principles, especially those concerning his moral epistemology. Moreover, beyond her apologetic aim, she also presented her own moral philosophy, arguing that the true ground of morality is the rational and social nature of human beings. Although Trotter was clearly inspired by John Locke, her Defence was not simply a vindication, and she was not his mere handmaiden, for her thought was original and independent in many respects.
2021, The Self: A History, edited by Patricia Kitcher (New York: Oxford University Press)
John Locke accepts that every perception gives me immediate and intuitive knowledge of my own existence. However, this knowledge is limited to the present moment when I have the perception. If I want to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions of my continued existence over time, Locke argues that it is important to clarify what ‘I’ refers to. While we often do not distinguish the concept of a person from that of a human being in ordinary language, Locke emphasizes that this distinction is important if we want to engage with questions of identity over time. According to Locke, persons are thinking intelligent beings who can consider themselves as extended into the past and future and who are concerned for their happiness and accountable for their actions. Moreover, for Locke a self is a person, considered from a first-personal point of view. I show that the concept of self that he develops in the context of his discussion of persons and personal identity is richer and more complex than the I-concept that he invokes in his version of the cogito. I further argue that Locke’s moral and religious views explain why he emphasizes the need for a conceptual distinction between persons and human beings. In the final section I turn to the reception of Locke’s view by some of his early critics and defenders, including Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, an anonymous author, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn.
Locke famously claims that we can have demonstrative knowledge of morality. Ever since the publication of Locke’s Essay, though, critics such as Thomas Burnet have claimed that Locke’s moral theory, and other views, make certainty about morality impossible. For Locke holds a natural law theory of morality according to which God’s commands make an action morally good or bad, and God must enforce those commands with divine sanctions in an afterlife. Burnet objects, first, that if God’s commands were arbitrary, there would be no way for us to determine what it is that God has commanded us to do without the help of revelation. Second, he argues that because Locke is agnostic about the immateriality of the soul, on Locke’s view we cannot be certain that there are divine sanctions in an afterlife. For these reasons Burnet concludes that, according to Locke’s own commitments, we cannot know that a particular action is morally good or bad. In this paper, I argue that, on Locke’s view, morality depends on God’s non-arbitrary will, which is discoverable by reason, and that Locke thinks he can demonstratively prove there will be an afterlife. Moreover, Catherine Trotter Cockburn gave a similar reply to Burnet in 1702. So, contrary to what Burnet and others have thought, I follow Cockburn in claiming that Locke can consistently claim that we can have demonstrative knowledge of morality.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/cockburn/
Although she has been not included in the standard account of the history of philosophy, Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an active contributor to the early modern philosophical discourse, especially regarding morality.. Her philosophical production was primarily in defence of John Locke and Samuel Clarke. Nevertheless, her thought was original and independent in many respects. Cockburn’s moral philosophy combines elements of Locke's epistemology with Clarke’s fitness theory, and its central axiom is that the true ground of morality consists in human nature. She argued that, since all human beings are naturally provided with reason, moral obligation rests on the conformity of God’s command to our own reason. According to her anti-voluntarist moral view, the will of God does not lay the foundations of morality, but it only gives morality the force of a law. Furthermore, Cockburn maintained that Man is naturally inclined towards sociability and, consequently, morally obliged to contribute to the good and preservation of society. This is one of the most distinctive of Cockburn’s ideas, which departs from a strictly Lockean moral view. Cockburn entertained a universal and anti-dogmatic idea of the Christian religion, founded on the essentials of human nature, i.e. reason and sociability. In her view, since there is not an absolutely perfect communion, everyone can choose the one she/he judges as the best. Churches should not waste time presuming to be infallible; rather, they should aim at satisfying their adherents, by teaching those truths necessary for salvation. Thus, she converted to the Church of England from Catholicism. Although mainly focused on morality, Cockburn also dealt with some metaphysical issues that often connected to it: particularly, the nature of the soul and the reality of space. Regarding the former, she inquired whether the soul is material or spiritual, concluding that, although it is probably immaterial, there is no evidence against its immateriality or the possibility of thinking matter. Moreover, while she defended Locke’s position that only consciousness makes personal identity, Cockburn also gave an original mode-based interpretation of Locke’s view on personhood. As regards the reality of space, she rejected Edmund Law’s position against Clarke that space is only an abstract idea. On the contrary, she argued that space is a real being, which can fill up the abyss between body and spirit, since it partakes of the nature of both.
In this thesis, I defend Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy from the accusation that her simultaneous embrace of rationalism and empiricism commits her to certain logical inconsistencies. Those who accuse Cockburn of inconsistency have failed to identify the components of her theory that they find objectionable. The accusations are not completely unfounded because Cockburn does inherit certain ambiguities from John Locke. In order to repudiate the accusations, I identify tensions in Cockburn’s work that a critic might claim automatically commit her to certain logical inconsistencies. While some of the ambiguities remain unresolved, I show that Cockburn combines elements of rationalism and empiricism to form a coherent theory. She corrects elements of Locke that would otherwise be incompatible with her rationalism, meaning she is not a simple mouthpiece for his philosophy. The goal of this thesis is to lay to rest the unjustified accusations of inconsistency against Cockburn so that present-day readers can judge her work with fresh eyes.
La vicenda intellettuale di Catharine Trotter Cockburn fu per molti aspetti straordinaria. Precoce poetessa e feconda drammaturga, fu molto apprezzata dai suoi contemporanei e i suoi lavori furono ripetutamente messi in scena tra la fine del XVII e l’inizio del XVIII secolo. Ella era, inoltre, dotata di vivacità speculativa non comune e di forte determinazione, qualità che le consentirono di travalicare i ristretti confini intellettuali imposti alle donne, in età moderna, dal loro ruolo sociale. Così, Trotter ebbe il merito di inserirsi nel dibattito filosofico del tempo, scrivendo e pubblicando alcune pregevoli opere filosofiche, la prima delle quali fu A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. Uscita anonima nel 1702, a Londra, l’opera prendeva le mosse da alcune critiche rivolte al Saggio di Locke dal teologo anglicano Thomas Burnet, edite anonime tra il 1697 e il 1699 in tre serie di Remarks. Pur seguendo il ritmo dei rilievi critici di Burnet in materia di morale, religione rivelata e immortalità dell’anima, tuttavia, l’argomentazione di Trotter si smarca dall’intento meramente apologetico, rivelando interessanti tratti di originalità. Soprattutto nell’orizzonte morale la sua riflessione assume i connotati di un vero e proprio razionalismo etico, in cui l’essere umano ritrova in se stesso il fondamento dell’obbligo morale, in quanto creatura naturalmente ragionevole e sociale.
2014, Vivarium
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) maintains that consciousness might be a material process or result from material processes. On the one hand, Collins accepts Locke’s view that from consciousness, i.e., the activity of thinking, we acquire no knowledge about the nature of the thinking substance. On the other, he takes seriously Samuel Clarke’s challenge that the thinking substance must be suitably unified because consciousness is unified. In this paper, I argue that, throughout his correspondence with Clarke, Collins maintains that consciousness signifies actual thinking and does not refer to the capacity of thinking. His main materialist thesis is that the powers of parts of material systems can bring about unified powers and that the power of thinking may be such a power. Collins attempts to satisfy the unity requirement by arguing that a unity correspondence can obtain between consciousness and the power of thinking that is realized in a material composite.
2002, Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy
2019, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern Age and in the Enlightenment, Vol. 4 of History of the Philosophy of Mind, 6 volumes, edited by Rebecca Copenhaver and Christopher Shields, London and New York: Routledge.
This chapter charts the metaphysical consequences of taking Locke’s repeated claims that consciousness makes one’s self through discussing the several senses in which we are sensible beings for Locke. Examination of self as a thing that is the proper subject of divine reward and punishment and Locke’s concept of ‘state of sensibility’ reveals that ‘state of sensibility’ means our subjectively lived-through experiential reality, continuation of which means continuation of a single subject of experience. So, his claim about consciousness making one’s self concerns not a kind of access we have to an underlying real self, but entails that the reality of one’s being a subject of experience consists of its conscious presence to itself.
This paper details Cockburn's metaphysics by way of showing what is so original about her moral naturalism. Cockburn held the view that virtue consists in following nature-humans have within their natures all that is needed for discerning moral distinctions and for appreciating their normative force. The foundations of moral right, for Cockburn, reside within human nature itself: humans are inherently rational and benevolent. It is only by attending to these internal principles that morality can be properly understood, for it is in these principles that our moral potential lies. Being moral, she believes, is a matter of fulfilling our moral potential and consists, thereby, in achieving virtue. But, perhaps most distinctively, Cockburn's naturalistic morality is grounded in a comprehensive system of nature, at once teleological and eudaimonistic. Cockburn held that nature carries a normative structure which expresses itself as morality at the level of human valuation, but which extends far beyond specifically human dimensions.
The set of three Remarks upon an Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London 1697-9) critiqued Locke’s moral theory, prompting a spirited defence by Catherine Trotter (later Cockburn). These Remarks have been attributed to Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse. This paper examines the grounds for this attribution, and present the historical and stylistic case for an alternative author – Richard Willis, successively Bishop of Gloucester, Salisbury and Winchester.
2017, Journal of the History of Philosophy
In this paper I argue that understanding John Locke’s account of personal identity in the context of the metaphysical and religious debates of his day, especially the debates concerning the possibility of the afterlife and the resurrection, reveals the strengths of his theory. I follow Locke in classifying the views of his predecessors into material, Cartesian and non-Cartesian immaterial views of the soul, and views, according to which human beings are mind-body unions. I identify metaphysical problems for each view respectively and argue that the strength of Locke’s account of personal identity is not only that it provides a response to the various problems that arise for the views of his predecessors, but also that he offers a theory that does not require him to prove their views to be mistaken and is thereby consistent with their mutually exclusive views.
Hypatia 24 (2009), 422-440
""In philosophical circles, Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630–1714) is known mainly as the friend, patron, and correspondent of Leibniz. While many scholars acknowledge Sophie’s interest in philosophy, some also claim that Sophie dabbled in philosophy herself, but did not do so either seriously or competently. In this paper I show that such a view is incorrect, and that Sophie did make interesting philosophical contributions of her own, principally concerning the nature of mind and thought.""
2020, Canadian Journal of Philosophy
This paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn's moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn's account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn's encounter with Shaftesbury's writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn's work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from 17th century natural law theory to the naturalism of the 18th century - that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.
2015, Hume Studies
Hume’s theory of personal identity is developed in response to Locke’s account of personal identity. Yet it is striking that Hume does not emphasize Locke’s distinction between persons and human beings. It seems even more striking that Hume’s account of the self in Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise has less scope for distinguishing persons from human beings than his account in Book 1. This is puzzling, because Locke originally introduced the distinction in order to answer questions of moral accountability and Hume’s discussion of the self in Book 2 provides the foundation of his moral theory in Book 3. In response to the puzzle I show that Locke and Hume hold different moral and religious views and these differences are important to explain why their theories of personal identity differ.
In this paper, I challenge the assumption that Kant's Third Paralogism has to do, first and foremost, with the question of personal identity. Beginning with a consideration of the treatments of the soul's personality in Christian Wolff's rational psychology, I show that, despite being influenced by Locke's novel account of personhood and confessing a dissatisfaction with the Scholastic definition of the term, Wolff maintained the agreement between his account of personality and the traditional conception. Moreover, Wolff did not put this concept to a forensic use but considered its primary application to be in the context of the demonstration of the soul's immortality which, according to him, required that after the death of the body the human soul retained its status personalitatis, understood as its distinct capacity to be conscious of its identity over time. Wolff's account of the soul's personality, and the use to which he put it, proved rather influential for metaphy-sicians like G. F. Meier and Moses Mendelssohn, and Kant's lectures in the 1770's also betray this influence. Considering the Third Paralogism in light of this context I claim that, rather than taking up the question of whether the numerical identity of the soul can be inferred from the meagre resources of the I think, what is at issue is the rational psychologist's account of how we are conscious of our numerical identity in different times. Despite disagreeing with the rational psychologist on this score, Kant nonetheless contends that the way in which we are, in fact, conscious of our numerical identity in all times qualifies us as persons and suffices for that concept's use in the proof of the soul's immortality. This reading thus makes sense of Kant's claim that the soul's personality, even with its transcendental grounding, is " necessary and sufficient for practical use, " and provides a charitable alternative to the recent allegation of a paralogism of pure practical reason on Kant's part.
2019
This volume is an edited collection of private letters and published epistles to and from English women philosophers of the early modern period (c. 1650–1700). It includes the letters and epistles of Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet. These women were the correspondents of some of the best-known intellectuals of the period, including Constantijn Huygens, Walter Charleton, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Their epistolary exchanges range over a wide variety of philosophical subjects, from religion, moral theology, and ethics to epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. The volume includes a main introduction by the editor, which explains the significance of the letters and epistles with respect to early modern scholarship and the study of women philosophers. It is argued that this selection of texts demonstrates the intensely collaborative and gender-inclusive nature of philosophical discussion in this period. To help situate each woman’s thought in its historical-intellectual context, the volume also includes original introductory essays for each principal figure, showing how her correspondences contributed to the formation of her own views as well as those of her better-known male contemporaries. The text also provides detailed scholarly annotations, explaining obscure philosophical ideas and archaic words and phrases in the letters and epistles. Among its critical apparatus, the volume includes a note on the texts, a bibliography, and an index.
Questions about immortality and a future state have intrigued philosophers throughout history. Philosophers have often sought an explanation of the nature of the soul that implies an afterlife for it. This problem is fundamental to theology. Many people believe when they die there will be an afterlife of bliss released from the suffering of the world and that there will be damnation for the sinful. Plato defined the soul as incorporeal and an eternal part of our being. He argues the body dies but the soul is continually reborn. Aristotle joined body and soul but stated that the active intellect is eternal and separate from the body; leaving it a matter for argument whether the active intellect was one active being for all humanity. In the philosophical writings of David Hume, immortality and a future state are central to his sceptical inquiry on religion. He openly challenges the gospels’ promise of immortality by sceptical reasoning and empirical method. Hume came under severe criticism by contemporaries most of whom were from a religious background. This dissertation focuses on the criticisms by Mr M. in Anonymous remarks on Hume’s Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, Ascribed to the Late David Hume, Esq. with regards to Hume’s essay Of the Immortality of the Soul. A Humean response to Mr M.’s criticisms will analyse the arguments in Of the Immateriality of the Soul and Of Personal Identity in A Treatise of Human Nature, Providence and a Future State in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm and Of the Standard of Taste. This will ascertain whether Hume’s rebuttals are successful and suggest further Humean responses where necessary.
Locke's sympathetic attitude towards the possibility of 'thinking matter' is shown to inform his robustly hedonistic moral philosophy and his emphasis on the virtues of forgiveness and toleration.
The self is a central metaphysical concept in the feminist philosophy of early modern English thinker Mary Astell (1666-1731). Some scholars have pointed to Astell’s commitment to the Cartesian idea of the self as an essentially thinking, immaterial thing. But few have noted that Astell radically departs from the orthodox Cartesian position by denying perfect knowledge of the soul. In this chapter, it is shown that, contrary to Descartes, Astell maintains that we cannot have a distinct idea of the essence of the self. Instead she upholds a conception of the self which is much closer to that of her French contemporary Nicolas Malebranche and his English disciple John Norris. This chapter examines the role that the Malebranchean concept of the self plays in Astell’s feminist thought. It is argued that while this concept might not be a wholly adequate foundation for Astell’s views concerning a woman’s immateriality, immortality, and freedom of mind, it nevertheless suffices for the practical moral and feminist purposes of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694; 1697). A close examination of this topic is also valuable for showing that Astell’s concept of the self is more subtle and sophisticated than scholars have hitherto acknowledged.
A precis of Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century.
2019, Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women's Philosophical Thought, eds. Marcy Lascano and Eileen O'Neill (Springer), chapter 17
This chapter provides the first analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s major contributions to modern political philosophy stem from her visionary use of the concept of intersectionality to diagnose the causes, symptoms, and remedies of gender-, race-, and class-based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft’s theory of social justice—the most egalitarian of the Enlightenment era—aimed to eliminate such arbitrary inequalities, in part through the legislation and protection of rights for women and other historically oppressed groups. Wollstonecraft should thus be understood as a philosophical forerunner of contemporary third-wave feminists, who use intersectionality as a foundational concept for theorizing social justice.
2019
Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments.
2015, Philosophy Compass
John Locke discusses the notions of identity and diversity in Book 2, Chapter 27 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. At the beginning of this much-discussed chapter, Locke posits the place-time-kind principle. According to this principle, no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time (2.27.1). Just what Locke means by this is unclear, however. So too is whether this principle causes problems for Locke, and whether these problems can be resolved. This is significant because the place-time-kind principle is foundational to Locke’s discussion of identity. Moreover, the place-time-kind principle stands at the center of a number of lively and long-standing debates in Locke scholarship. These include the debates over the ontological status of Lockean persons, and whether Locke is a relative identity theorist, to name just two. In this paper, I offer a survey of how Locke’s place-time-kind principle has been interpreted in the secondary literature. The aim of this taxonomy is to clarify where the differences between competing interpretations lie, and additionally show just how challenging it is to determine which reading is best.
2009, Neurosurgery
2015, The Southern Journal of Philosophy
The importance of John Locke’s discussion of persons is undeniable. Locke never explicitly tells us whether he thinks persons are substances or modes, however. We are thus left in the dark about a fundamental aspect of Locke’s view. Many commentators have recently claimed that Lockean persons are modes. In this paper I swim against the current tide in the secondary literature and argue that Lockean persons are substances. Specifically I argue that what Locke says about substance, power and agency commits him to the claim that persons are substances. I consider the passages mode interpreters cite and show why these passages do not imply that Lockean persons are modes. I also respond to two objections any one who thinks Lockean persons are substances must address. I show that a substance reading of Locke on persons can be sympathetic and viable. I contend that with a clearer understanding of the ontological status of Lockean persons we can gain a firmer grasp of what Locke’s picture of persons looks like. Finally, once we are armed with a better understanding of Locke on substance, mode and personhood, we can pave the way toward a more nuanced description of the early modern debate over personal identity.
1999, Leibniz Society Review
In her influential 1976 article, "Leibniz: Self-Consciousness and Immortality In the Paris Notes and After," Margaret Wilson argues that Leibniz's mature theory of personal identity is incoherent. In this paper, I shall consider the several ways in which interpreters, since 1976, have attempted to challenge the premises of Wilson's argument, and so have tried to rescue Leibniz's theory from Wilson's charge of incoherence. I shall argue that only one of these ways stands any chance of being successful.
forthcoming in volume on 18th-century empiricism and the sciences, eds. AL Rey & S Bodenmann
My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but significantly, is also a medical phrase used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Locke 1975, I.i.2), which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of natural-philosophical methods; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Locke 1975, I.i.6). There is more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which belongs to what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as Hartley saw and Diderot stated more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point [Armstrong 1968, 1978]: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from Locke’s logic of ideas to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds.
Locke’s theory of personal identity was philosophically groundbreaking for its attempt to establish a non-substantial identity condition. Locke states, “For the same consciousness being preserv’d, whether in the same or different Substances, the personal Identity is preserv’d” (II.xxvii.13). Many have interpreted Locke to think that consciousness identifies a self both synchronically and diachronically by attributing thoughts and actions to a self. Thus, many have attributed to Locke a memory theory of personal identity. But memory theories taken as metaphysical theories stumble on circularity. In response, some have attributed to Locke an appropriation theory of personal identity. Appropriation theory interpretations, however, are insufficient for Locke’s moral theory insofar as he is committed to a theory of divine rectification. God must have something objective to look to in determining our eternal rewards. The common problem is that for coherence Locke’s theory seems to demand an objective, or metaphysical, fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to a traditional notion of substance for the continuity. I’m suggesting something new. In II.xxvii of the Essay, we see an ambiguity in Locke’s use of the term ‘consciousness’. Locke seems to see consciousness as both a mental state by means of which we are aware of ourselves as perceiving and as the ongoing self we are aware of in these conscious states. The first sense of consciousness is a momentary psychological state of myself as perceiving, say, past and present ideas. The second sense of consciousness is the objective fact of an ongoing consciousness. First, I make the textual argument why we should read Locke as having a conception of a metaphysical fact of a continuing consciousness that does not appeal to thinking or bodily substance to establish its continuity. That is, consciousness is something that endures through our momentary conscious states of ourselves even if the full duration of a continuing consciousness is known only by God. I then argue that the metaphysical fact of an enduring consciousness is revealed to us as a phenomenological fact of experience. Due to the nature of certain kinds of perceptual situations we have an experience of ourselves as temporally extended. Nevertheless, the metaphysical fact of consciousness is philosophically distinguished from the phenomenological fact. Although the text bears out that Locke seemed to think there is a fact of an ongoing consciousness, I argue that it is consistent with his reluctance elsewhere that he makes no further epistemological or ontological claims about it. Finally, I provide an account of Locke’s understanding of memory and its relation to consciousness that supports the claim that consciousness is something ontologically distinct from either thinking or bodily substance.
1997, Enlightenment & Dissent
The philosophy of Samuel Clarke is of central importance for an adequate understanding of Hume’s Treatise. Despite this, most Hume scholars have either entirely overlooked Clarke’s work, or referred to it in a casual manner that fails to do justice to the significance of the Clarke-Hume relationship. This tendency is particularly apparent in accounts of Hume’s views on space in Treatise I.ii. In this paper, I argue that one of Hume’s principal objectives in his discussion of space is to discredit Clarke’s Newtonian doctrine of absolute space and, more deeply, the ‘argument a priori’ that Clarke constructs around it. On the basis of this interpretation, I argue that Hume’s ‘system’ of space constitutes an important part of his more fundamental ‘atheistic’ or anti- Christian objectives in the Treatise.
1998
Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim. CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm) 1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history Appendix: memory and connectionism Part I Animal spirits and memory traces Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces 2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits 3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain' Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory Part II Inner discipline Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline 4 Spirit sciences, memory motions 5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory 6 Local and distributed representations 7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27 8 The puzzle of survival 9 Spirits, body, and self 10 The puzzle of elimination Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association' Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association' 11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline 12 Associationism and neo-associationism 13 Hartley's distributed model of memory 14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory 15 Representations, realism, and history 16 Attacks on traces 17 Order, confusion, remembering References Index
2005, Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy
The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, anti-naturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.”
Mary Astell (1666–1731) is best known today as one of the earliest English feminists. This book sheds new light on her writings by interpreting her first and foremost as a moral philosopher—as someone committed to providing guidance on how best to live. The central claim of this work is that all the different strands of Astell’s thought—her epistemology, her metaphysics, her philosophy of the passions, her feminist vision, and her conservative political views—are best understood in light of her ethical objectives. To support that claim, this work examines Astell’s programme to bring about a moral transformation of character in her fellow women. This ethical programme draws on several key aspects of seventeenth-century philosophy, including Cartesian and Neoplatonist epistemologies, ontological and cosmological proofs for the existence of God, rationalist arguments for the soul’s immateriality, and theories about how to regulate the passions in accordance with reason. At the heart of Astell’s philosophical system lies a theory of virtue, including guidelines about how to cultivate generosity of character, a benevolent disposition towards others, and the virtue of moderation. This book explains the foundations of that moral theory, and then examines how it shapes and informs Astell’s response to male tyranny within marriage and to political tyranny in the state. It concludes with some reflections on the historiographical implications of writing Mary Astell back into the history of philosophy.