Edited by Earle Havens and James G. Buickerood
| Earle Havens, Introduction |
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| James G. Buickerood and Earle Havens, "Charting Locke's Legacy" |
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| Jonathan Israel, "John Locke and the Intellectual Legacy of the Early Enlightenment" |
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Locke has long been regarded as a 'founding father' of the Enlightenment, a figure of
immense influence on eighteenth-century Western thought, and this he certainly was.
However, he was embraced much more eagerly by certain sections of the Enlightenment than
by others. In particular, it was the moderate mainstream and conservative elements of the
Enlightenment (except in Germany and in Russia) that tended to lionize Locke. His
epistemology and his efforts to limit the scope of philosophy were considered by these
elements the best avaailable defense of miracles and of a separate sphere for theology and
ecclesiastical authority. By contrast, the wing of the Enlightenment inspired by Spinoza,
Bayle and Dierot - that is, the 'Radical Enlightenment' which insisted on reason alone, and
was not interested in defending miracles or theology - neither followed nor admired Locke to
any significant degree. In these circles, including those who chiefly shaped the Enclyclopedie,
Locke was not a major influence. He was also largely ignored (albeit for very different
reasons) by Leibniz and the Wolffians. Ironically, though, it was precisely the reverse with
his politial doctrine of justified resistance; only the Radical Enlightenment was interested in
this (albeit detaching Locke's name from the package) whilst the mainstream boycotted this
sole radical element in his thought. However, hitherto historians have been much more
willing to stress Locke's appeal, and the ardor shown by Voltaire and others to promote his
reputation, than to draw attention to the countervailing disdain for Locke shown by equally
key figures such as Bayle and Diderot.
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| Mark Goldie, "The Early Lives of John Locke" |
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During the Enlightenment Locke became an iconic figure, yet, remarkably, no full-length biography
of him appeared before 1876. Partly this was Locke's own doing; he evaded revelation of the quotidian and
staked his reputation on his published books. Nonetheless he was destined to have a rich biographical
afterlife, not in academic biography but in Grub Street. Countless entries on Locke appeared in the biographical dictionaries
that proliferated during the eighteenth century. I explore the early biographical tradition, and especially
the central role of Jean Le Clerc's brief Life and Character of Mr John Locke. I go on to show
how Locke's authority, through the medium of biography, was appropriated on behalf of later causes. One
incident in Locke's life loomed exceptionally large: his expulsion from Oxford in 1684. During the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this incident became a leitmotif in debates about civil and religious
liberty, the development of modern philosophy, and the need for university reform.
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| J.R. Milton, "John Locke: The Modern Biographical Tradition" |
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Locke left to posterity a very large quantity of private papers, and the modern biographical tradition
begins with the first writer to make significant use of these, Lord King (1829). King's Life of John
Locke made a mass of new material available to later scholars, but his own work was marred by carelessness;
the Life is a mass of material rather than a true systematic biography. H. R. Fox Bourne (1876)
was far more thorough, and careful, but though he made good use of other sources, he had no access
to the Locke papers used by King. The only full-scale biography of Locke since then was by Maurice
Cranston (1957); it relied heavily on Locke's journals and correspondence, and made relatively little use of
other sources. Kenneth Dewhurst's medical biography (1963) made use of Locke's medical notebooks as well
as his journals, but his dating of much of the material he used was speculative and frequently erroneous.
Richard Ashcraft (1986) investigated Locke's political activities with great thoroughness, but his
account is marred by a tendency to read into the documents the story that he wanted them to tell.
Even Peter Laslett's work on the Two Treatises (1960), one of the major achievements on Locke
scholarship in the twentieth century, has some of the same flaws. Until reliable techniques of dating
material in Locke's papers, expecially his commonplace books, have been developed and used, no fully satisfactory
biography will be possible.
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| Justin Champion, "'A law of continuity in the progress of theology': Assessing the Legacy of John Locke's
Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695-2004" |
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John Locke admitted forcefully in his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) that he was not
infallible; he would not set himself up as an apostle; that he had no intention of establishing
or imposing his interpretation of scripture on anyone. As this paper will illustrate, a repeated
aspect of the reception of the work over the subsequent centuries, contrary to Locke's
intentions, claimed that the Reasonableness asserted definitive doctrinal claims. Different
readers and editors attempted to capture the work for their political and religious projects.
Arguably this reception contradicted the purpose of the Reasonableness, which was to show
people how to read scripture, not what to believe. For Locke this reading of scripture was a
fundamentally sincere and pious activity; for others (the paper discusses the case of his friend
Anthony Collins) this practice of reading was pronte to latent heterodoxy.
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| Ian Harris, "The Legacy of 'Two Treatises of Government'" |
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Locke's alteration in the inherited terms of political thinking was made possible by a prior
change in metaphysics. Filmer's politics rested upon an Aristotelian conception of causality
and a specific view of causal content but Locke had other views. His rejection of Filmer
succeeded his narrowing of the scope of Aristotle's view of causality. Locke understood
causality only in terms of efficient cause. This shift in metaphysical thinking is important for
our purpose, because it established that explanations made in terms of efficient causality
would be decisive. That is how Locke proceeded. Two Treatises set out two sequences of
explanation, one each about politics and society, in both of which efficient causes played a
crucial role. Just as Locke had revised causal content in one central instance, by replacing
Adam with God as the causal power in procreation, so more widely He was a major source of
efficient causation in Two Treatises. What was the causal content He provided? He
originated people's natural faculties, standing, duties and rights, which were the
preconditions of Lockean political institutions, and He was also the author of the appetites,
desires, and situational needs that gave rise to human society. These causal antecedants
informed Locke's distinctive account of government and society. Indeed, divine initiation
informed not only the existence but also the character of society in respect of private
property, the family, and marriage. So Two Treatises was an explanation of the existence and
powers of government, as well as the character of society, that rested heavily on Locke's
postulates about efficient causality, and on the content of efficient causation that he attributed
to God. The book had further bearings. Locke both made a contribution to historical thinking
and identified criteria, which in an important sense are factual, to judge social and political
developments: these suggested that only one sort of historical result was acceptable. Such
features are accessions of content, if also in some respects a narrowing of it. The
explanations of Two Treatises also narrowed the scope of civil government, because they
were crucial to Locke's exclusion of religious worship as such from its remit. Locke's
metaphysical revisions are thus of a piece with his distinctive views about politics, society,
and worship: they help us to understand why Locke's thought makes sense to us, and to
recogize Locke as a contributor to subsequent thinking. Yet, for other reasons, Two
Treatises has not proved easy for posterity to assimilate. If it embodies distintive views that
have acquired enduring importance, it also poses a challenge to some contemporary thinking.
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| G.A.J. Rogers, "Locke's 'Essay concerning Human Understanding':
The Philosophical Legacy" |
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In this paper I argue that Locke's philosophical legacy was substantial and profound. Although
this is hardly a new claim - Ryle and Russell saw Locke's legacy as enormous, second only to
Aristotle's - it still remains unclear as to exactly what that legacy is. I argue here that for a large
part of the world since his day it is the scope and nature of philosophy that Locke identified that
has fixed its place in the intellectual landscape and constitutes his philosophical legacy. Before
Locke, philosophy was understood as comprehending the whole of knowledge, itself largely
defined by the range and content of the works of Aristotle, which themselves fixed the subject
matter of inquiries in the universities. Even such modern thinkers as Bacon and Descartes saw
the scope of philosophy in the broad compass. Locke, however, saw the task of the philosopher
as entirely different. No longer should the philosopher seek to set out a comprehensive system
of knowledge both natural and intellectual. Rather, he should confine himself to the more
modest aspiration of clearing confusions in our formulations of the way we take the world to
be. Perhaps, above all, he taught us to refrain from claiming to know more than our arguments
will bear. It was ths new philosophical task that has come to characterize our modern
understanding of philosophy, with its emphasis on analysis, that came to dominate the subject in
the twentieth century and which remains a large part of Locke's legacy to us today.
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| Paul Schuurman, "Locke's Modest Impact on Eighteenth-Century Natural Science:
The Encyclopedic Evidence" |
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Since most eighteenth-century encyclopedias pay generous attention to the sciences, and since
many of these works of reference show a general presence of Locke's 'way of ideas,'
encyclopedias are promising media for an assessment of Locke's influence on natural science
in that century. Eighteenth-century science was empiricist, corpuscular and mechanist, but
Locke was not the only philosopher to have defended these views. In order to establish his
particular influence we must be clear about the specific features of his brand of empiricism.
Amonst these special traits, his all-pervasive doubt about the possibility of certain scientific
knowledge of bodies deserves special notice. Locke's pessimism is at odds with the distinctly
more optimistic epistemic views contained in most eighteenth-century encyclopedias. A
similar point can be made about hs scientific method: insofar as it is original, it only
partially answers the needs of natural science as described in eighteenth-centruy
enclyclopedias. First, Locke's "Historical, plain Method: does not provide rules for a theory
of induction. Second, even if his historical method can be regarded as a form of induction,
then this would still amount to only a partial contribution to the eighteenth-century
encyclopedias. Finally, by the time Locke had developed his philosophical empiricism,
empiricist science had embarked on a succesful development that seemed to reduce the need
for any philosophical justification at all.
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| Barbara Arneil, "Citizens, Wives, Latent Citizens and Non-Citizens in the 'Two Treatises':
A Legacy of Inclusion, Exclusion and Assimilation" |
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This paper addresses John Locke's legacy in the United States of America. While much has
been written by both liberal and republican proponents regarding the degree to which the
American constitution is founded in Lockean political principles, the starting point for this
paper is a more critical analysis of the distinctions Locke draws between citizens and 'others'
in his political theory, and how these demarcations created a certain kind of legacy with
respect to the exercise of citizenship in the American state from its inception through to the
second half of the twentieth century. In the first half of the article, I delineate through textual
analysis the two key principles by which Locke distinguishes citizens (freeman) from non-citizen
others: 1) The public sphere (freemen) governed by the equality of 'political' authority
versus the private sphere (wives, children, idiots, lunatics, servants and slaves) governed
under a hierarchical set of personal authorities; 2) the industrious and rational (citizens)
versus the idle and irrational. Through these two principles, Locke creates three categories of
people: citizens, latent citizens (who may become citizens if they are industrious and
rational); and non-citizens who shall never be citizens (perpetually in the private sphere or
incapable of industry or reason or both). In the second half of the article, I shall use this
division between the citizen, the latent citizen and the non-citizen to examine the liberal legacy of
inclusion, assimilation and segregation of various groups of people living in America through
a concrete historiography of exclusions to the franchise in nineteenth-century America.
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