EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT
Editor: James G. Buickerood
In Memory of John W. Yolton
November 10, 1921 - November 3, 2005
John W. Yolton, John Locke Professor of the History of Philosophy, Emeritus, of Rutgers University, died
of cardiac arrest Thursday, 3 November 2005 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Born to a civil engineer and
piano teacher in Birmingham, Alabama on 10 November 1921, Yolton spent most of his youth in Cincinnati,
Ohio where he received his early education. He graduated B.A. with honors in philosophy from the University
of Cincinnati in June 1945, and remained there to work with Julius R. Weinberg another year, completing his
M.A. thesis, "British Empiricism and Our Knowledge of the External World," in June 1946. John married Jean
Sebastian in September 1945, initiating an intimate partnership that shaped and informed his teaching,
research, and writing life, commemorated in his numerous book dedications to her.
Following three years of graduate study (notably with Edward W. Strong) and teaching at the University of
California, Berkeley, Yolton won a Fulbright Grant to Balliol College, Oxford, where, under the supervision
of Gilbert Ryle, he conducted the research in 1950-52 that resulted in his D.Phil. thesis, "John Locke and
the Way of Ideas; a Study of the impact of Locke's Epistemology and Metaphysics upon his Contemporaries."
Four years later this study, dedicated to Weinberg, was published in Oxford University Press's Classical
and Philosophical Monographs series as John Locke and the Way of Ideas. The book identified the targets of
Locke's critique of innate ideas and principles, and put Book 1 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding
in a completely new light. It was and remains today seminal; and together with contemporaneous research on
Locke by Wolfgang von Leyden and Peter Laslett, it inaugurated the first serious, sustained, and rigorous
program of study of that philosopher's thought and influence that continues to this day.
After leaving Oxford, Yolton held a number of teaching and administrative posts of varying duration at The
Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, Princeton University, Kenyon College, and the University
of Maryland. He joined York University, Toronto, as Professor and founding Chairman of the Department of
Philosophy in 1963. He guided the Philosophy Department during its formative years until 1973 when he
became Acting President of the University for a year and a half. He also served as Acting Dean of the
Graduate School in 1967-68. His profound pedagogic and administrative mark on York continues to be
recognized and appreciated. His contribution is now celebrated in York's biennial lecture series,
"Weighing the Scales of Locke," inaugurated in 2003 on the occasion of John and Jean Yolton's bequest of
his magnificent rare book collection to the University. In 1978, Yolton departed for Rutgers University as
Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Rutgers College. Having contributed as Dean to the reorganization of
the university faculty, he stepped down from the decanal position in 1985, but continued to teach in the
philosophy department until his retirement in 1992, holding the first named chair in that department. He
taught graduates and undergraduates with equal deftness and enthusiasm, and while at Rutgers found time to
teach junior and senior scholars in his Folger Institute of Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies
seminar, "Space and Time, Matter and Mind." As a department, college, and university administrative officer,
Yolton was, as H. Ian Macdonald of York University has observed, naturally "quiet, fair-minded and
respected" - qualities equally characteristic of his teaching, scholarly, and personal life.
It was as a teacher, colleague, and scholar that John Yolton was most well recognized, appreciated, and
beloved. And it is as a teacher, colleague, and scholar that he will be most intensely missed. His graduate
seminars were characterized by an informal, collective examination of texts and issues, introducing young
philosophers to the rigors of careful textual analysis and interpretative argument. Students were often
pleasantly taken aback by the extensive, probing, critical and encouraging typed comments they received
from John within days of their submission of research papers to him. As a teacher, Yolton was unfailingly
generous with his time, energy, knowledge and even on occasion his invaluable research library. In fact,
this generosity was so extensive as to be difficult to reconcile with his prodigious output as a writer,
reviewer, referee, and scholarly correspondent. Yolton's love of philosophy and scholarship inhibited any
impulse to produce clones of his students, and a great many of them have made their contributions to fields
other than philosophy or its history. Nevertheless, a number of John's students still work in the history
of modern philosophy, including the University of Toronto graduate, Henry Schankula; University of Maryland
undergraduate Wade Robison; York undergraduate Peter Loptson; the four York graduates to whom John dedicated
his influential studies, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1983) and Perceptual
Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (1984): John P. Wright, Shadia Drury, Sylvana Tomaselli, and Stephen
Ford; and Rutgers graduate, James G. Buickerood.
John's teaching was not restricted to seminars, lecture halls or formal institutes. He devoted much energy
to the encouragement of younger scholars, whose work he commented on extensively. Michael Ayers, author of
influential studies of Locke and Berkeley, related in 1991 how his fortuitous meeting with John at Oxford
years earlier contributed to the beginnings and sustenance of his own work on Locke: "John's remarkable
knowledge of the primary philosophical literature and his infectious enthusiasm carried me into the then
small world of serious Locke studies, a world which already owed much to him and has come to owe much more."
Similar reminiscences could readily be had from a great many other philosophical scholars, working on Hume,
Descartes, Arnauld, Malebranche, as well as many lesser-known figures in the history of philosophy. He also
inspired numerous scholars working in history, literature, political science, art history and other
disciplines, to whom Yolton was an indefatigable mentor, critic and friend; these include Christopher Fox,
John C. O'Neal, Barbara Stafford, and Peter Walmsley. Whatever the venue, John brought to his teaching and
to his scholarship the rare qualities of unaffected generosity, genuine interest in the work of others,
imaginative philosophical vision, openness to radically new interpretations, and rigorous textual discipline.
Some sense of his approach to cooperative textual study can be gleaned especially from his 1977 Locke
Reader, now lamentably out of print.
From his earliest publication in 1948 ("A Defense of Sense Data"), to his last, in 2005 ("Logic as 'those
right helps of Art' in the Dutch Republic"), Yolton covered the span of the history of philosophy and much
of the range of theoretical philosophy with varying emphases. His strictly theoretical work focused
primarily on epistemic issues of perception, concept acquisition and formation, action theory, and
metaphysical analysis as broadly consonant with the empirical tradition as it had developed from his
beloved seventeenth century to the later twentieth. He pursued, in effect, what would now be called a
research program signaled in embryonic form by his M.A. thesis. John was an early advocate of the
philosophical appropriation of work in psychological theory and research, particularly by Jean Piaget and
J.J. Gibson, in a series of papers on perception and action theory and in his 1962 Thinking and Perceiving.
An interest in the philosophy of George Santayana stemming from his undergraduate days, led to a
correspondence with that philosopher and a number of related essays, reviews, and editorial introductions.
Through the 1950s and 1960s John published a series of essays on Locke on ideas, experience, the law of
nature, knowledge of body, and science of nature. These studies culminated in the innovative Locke and the
Compass of Human Understanding (1970), the book that revealed the still-developing depth and lineaments of
Yolton's textually rigorous and provocative understanding of that philosopher. In it he established the
central place of natural history in Locke's conception of science, and explained the role of the
corpuscularian hypothesis in his thought. Yolton also further developed his interpretations of Locke's
theory of knowledge, his theory of agency, and his moral philosophy. Henceforth, John's work commanded the
attention of everyone working in the field. While he became known in particular for the theses of his 1956
and 1970 books, John's repeated approaches to Locke's work over the years were fresh undertakings, begun
with minimal preconception. A special interest - one that informed his daily life in the classroom - to
which he returned repeatedly was Locke's view of education. John and Jean's 1989 Clarendon edition of Some
Thoughts concerning Education was preceded by his diminutive yet surprisingly comprehensive monograph, John
Locke and Education, by some eighteen years and exhibited significantly different emphases and lines of
approach to that subject than he had explored in the earlier treatment.
Locke: An Introduction appeared in 1985, an introductory exploration of its subject's thought and life
conceived entirely on John's own terms. (How many introductory studies of major philosophers open with a
mystery and a romance like 'the red trunk' and 'Philoclea and Philander'?) Again, 1993's Locke Dictionary
is an uncommon instantiation of its kind. This work publicizes in extenso John's deep conviction in the
merits of compiling a dictionary of an author's works in the effort to learn precisely what he says in
order to understand what he means. John's final book, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke (2004)
once again shows its author's fresh engagement with long-familiar texts and issues. It is a startling and
suggestive examination of concepts and themes long overlooked by students of Locke. It is indubitably
provocative, and will doubtless instigate wide-ranging and fruitful debate - like most of Yolton's
scholarship; like good scholarship should.
Yolton's 1983 book on early modern theories of perception from Descartes to Reid has inspired a vigorous
debate on the historical accuracy and intelligibility of the 'veil of ideas' doctrine attributed to his
predecessors by the latter philosopher. Can Descartes and Locke really be read as direct realists, as
Yolton has provocatively suggested? His 1984 book on the British legacy of Locke's suggestion that matter
could think was complemented by his 1991study, Locke and French Materialism. In these works John raised the
question of the role of physiological models in eighteenth-century accounts of thought and action, and of
the role of the passive matter doctrine shared by Cartesians and Newtonians alike in the resilience of
eighteenth-century dualism. Can Priestley's materialism be attributed to developments in later
eighteenth-century matter theory that postulated the essential activity of matter, as Yolton has suggested?
The productivity of John's post-retirement years was truly remarkable. It resulted inter alia in two
highly creative books -- Perception and Reality (1996), and Realism and Appearances (2000). In both books,
as in his earlier exchange with Richard Rorty over early modern accounts of perceptual cognition and their
relevance to assumptions and principles motivating twentieth-century accounts, John shows his sensitive
engagement with contemporary philosophical debate. In these two books, the views of writers such as Paul
Churchland, Colin McGinn, and John McDowell interact with the early modern positions of Arnauld,
Malebranche, Locke, Hume and Kant in fascinating and illuminating philosophical exchanges.
Through his nearly sixty-year career, John was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including
fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
He was the first recipient of the Leonard Nelson Essay Contest; the Association internationale de
collaboration scientifique awarded him the A.S. Eddington Essay Contest prize; and the University of
California, Berkeley awarded him the F.C.S. Schiller Prize. His honorary degrees include an LL.D. from
York University, and D.Litt. from McMaster University.
John Yolton is survived by his wife Jean Yolton of Piscataway, NJ; two daughters, Karen Griffith of Corpus
Christi, TX, and Pamela H. Smith of Toronto, Canada; and two granddaughters, Emily and Jane Griffith.
John's death has grieved scholars and friends on four continents.
James G. Buickerood and John P. Wright