LOCKE'S CONCEPT OF PERSON

Abstract

"The besetting sin of philosophers," observes Hilary putnam in his Dewey Lectures (March, 1994, Columbia University) "seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater." ' •From the beginning," he continues, "each 'new wave' of philosophers has simply ignored the insights of the previous wave in the course of advancing Its own. Today, we stand near the end of a century in which there have been many new insights in philosophy, but at the same time there has been an unprecedented forgetting of the insights of previous centuries and millennia." What better example could one find of such a situation than Locke's, whose views expressed in the four books which constitute his monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding were. and still are, severely criticized and in some cases abandaned by, not only his immediate successors but, even contemporary philosophers today without acknowledging his basic insights. For instance, Ryle, while commenting that the historians of philosophy have "written off" Locke not merely as an empiricist but as the founder of the School of English empiricism, observes, "It is not quite clear what an empiricist is, but it is quite clear that most of the doctrines which an empiricist should hold are strenuously denied by Locke. That the evidence of particular perceptions can never be a foundation for true knowledge, that true knowledge is both completely general and complitly certain and is of the type of pure mathematics, that inductive generalizations from collected observations can never yield better than probable generalizations giving us opinion but not knowledge, are doctrines which Locke's whole Essay is intended to establish. He even goes so far with the rationalist metaphysician as to hold that the existence of God is demonstrable, and he is at one with the Cambridge Platonists in arguing that the principles of morality are demonstrable by the same methods and with the same certainty as any of the propositions of geometry ('John Locke on the Human Understanding^e "Locke and Berkeley" Eds. Martin and Armstrong, pp. 25-26).