Volume 23, 2023

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This article presents some overlooked evidence on the reception of John Locke’s writings at Christ Church, Oxford. It is intended to supplement a new article in the History of Universities on the surprisingly positive response to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) at that bastion of late seventeenth-century high churchmanship. This evidence sheds new light on: the reception of Epicureanism at that college in the 1650s; Locke’s personal connections at Christ Church; book-holdings of Locke’s writings at the early eighteenth-century college; some unnoticed uses of Locke’s writings by members of Christ Church; the European and North American reception of one Christ Church Lockean; and, the changing trajectory of the later eighteenth-century reception of Locke at that college.

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According to Locke, scripture says nothing about the resurrection of the same body. We will be resurrected. But in what sense can resurrected Jane be the “same” as living Jane? Throughout his thinking, Locke holds that sameness of body and/or sameness of soul are not required for the resurrection of “the same Jane.” Sameness of person is required. Locke’s theory of personal identity was ground-breaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was provoking and resulted in a wave of critical responses. His distinction between “man” and “person” is important for his account of personal identity, but the distinction was hard for his contemporaries to understand. The correspondence between Locke and Edward Stillingfleet, for example, shows that for Stillingfleet the distinction between “man” and “person” is artificial. Having read this correspondence, Winch Holdsworth attacks Locke in a sermon in 1719 arguing that Locke denied the resurrection altogether. Catharine Trotter Cockburn tries to defend Locke in her Vindication. Despite her clear understanding of the distinctions applied by Locke, she too struggles with what to make of a person.

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In this paper I examine Locke’s criticism of the view that some species of natural objects are determined by real essences, a view I call species realism. Most commentators have focused either on Locke’s putative objections to the realist’s claim that species determining real essences exist or on his semantic case against the assumption that our species terms can refer to real essences that determine species. I identify another objection, which, I argue, is independent from both of these lines of criticism. This objection is essentially practical. It is based on the claim that adopting species realism has detrimental practical consequences: it undermines, Locke believes, our ability to sort particular natural objects into species. This alone, he argues, is already sufficient to set aside and ignore species realism when trying to sort objects into species.

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John Locke’s role in the advent of modernity has been debated widely. His work has been (ab)used by those arguing from libertarian, democratic, communitarian, socialist, feminist, or postcolonial points of view, either portraying him as a forefather of their preferred political theory or as an antagonist to their avowed political and philosophical goals. In this paper, we are primarily concerned with highlighting the importance of the executive’s prerogative in Locke’s philosophy, as we argue that this concept, often banished to the side-lines, is indeed central to Locke’s political theory. This partial neglect entails that some of the most popular readings of Locke are potentially based on faulty premises. We focus on how Locke’s prerogative is antithetical to the project of seeing Locke as a forefather of libertarianism. Furthermore, this paper’s arguments could also support challenges to interpretations of Locke as an early and important proponent of democracy. Rather than seeking to find support for modern theories through anachronistic and dubious readings of Locke, we focus on how he conceived of an exceedingly strong executive whose actions are exclusively restricted by the public good. We conclude that there is good reason to consider his philosophy proto-utilitarian, something that further highlights the conflict with libertarianism. As such, we conclude that libertarian or democratic theories postulating Locke as their direct predecessor should be re-examined to account for these findings.

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Locke traces the concept of active power to the experience of voluntary action in ourselves. I argue that Locke does not find in voluntary action a necessary connection binding volition and action. I defend the application of Locke’s regularity theory of causal judgment to the operation of the will. The will is classified as a cause because it is regularly accompanied by a movement in our limbs or a change in our thoughts. I argue that Locke does not equate the concepts of cause and active power. He maintains that something can serve as a cause, and so bring about change, in virtue of activity or in virtue of its susceptibility to external influence. I go on to develop what I refer to as the ascription puzzle. Locke, who provides a criterion for classifying something as a cause, does not develop a criterion of for classifying causes as either active or passive in nature. The ascription puzzle is vexing because Locke has no principled way to establish, among other things, that humans, in acting voluntarily, exercise active power. The result is that Locke should not be taken to identify the experience of voluntary action as the origin of the concept of active power because of any metaphysical considerations bearing on human agency.

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A review of Ruth Boeker’s recent book Locke on Persons and Personal Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).