Locke's Philosophy: Context and Content (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 307 both in the results it produced for the eighteenth century and in the conceptual suggestiveness it retains for twentieth-century science, testifies to the enduring importance of Leibniz's conception of scientific method. It may still, he observes in the book's final sentence, serve as a touchstone for the evaluation of accounts of method in contemporary philosophy of science. EMILY GROSHOLZ The Penmylvania State University G. A. J. Rogers, editor. Locke's Philosophy: Context and Content. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii + 257. Cloth, $49.95. The year 1989 marked the three-hundredth anniversary of the appearance of Locke's Epistola, the Two Treatises and the Essay (dated 169o). To celebrate these, Locke's first publications, a conference was held at Christ Church, Oxford, in 199o. The papers in this volume are a selection of those presented there. The papers are elegantly introduced by the editor, who not only presents the papers, but usefully discusses the motivation, circumstances, composition, and style of Locke's Essay. The volume makes many important contributions that will be of interest to Locke scholars, of course, but also to historians of philosophy and of ideas in the period. J. R. Milton's paper depicts the period of Locke's closest association with Oxford, from 1652 and his earliest student days to his departure for London in 1667. Uniquely among major philosophers, Locke moved to the mechanical philosophy from early interests that were predominantly in medicine. The subsequent philosophical path on which he embarked was his own creation, so we should not be surprised at the nearly three decades it took him to bring the Essay to term. Michael Ayers tells us that he was asked "for a broad discussion of Locke's general philosophy." Coming on the heels of his two-volume work on Locke (a991), the request can only have left him in a quandary. Even so, new material and emphases emerge here. In epistemology, one may be surprised by Locke's debt to, not just the Epicurean tradition, but also the Stoic. In ontology, Ayers continues his polemic as to whether substance for Locke is a pure logical subject, as Jonathan Bennett thinks, or whether essence and substance are ontologically identical. Neither seems willing to interpret Locke literally when he says that substance is a complex idea, which anyhow seems to yield the philosophically most interesting view. Michael Losonsky's paper is also polemical, the question being whether Book Three of the Essay presents a theory of linguistic meaning and public discourse, specifically , the theory that words mean ideas. Losonsky presents a very persuasive case on behalf of the standard reading that it does, against the revisionist readings of Ashworth and Hacking that it does not. A cavil might be that Ashworth's discussion of signification in terms of the late scholastic distinction between meaning and making known is not fully set out. According to Martha Brandt Bolton, the real Molyneux problem is not the classification of newly perceived shapes with previously felt shapes, for Locke held that shape is 308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL 1997 not immediately perceived at all. Instead, it is the nature of perception itself, here whether unconscious inference (Descartes) or experience (Gassendi) provides shape. The only weakness in this sophisticated and cogent account is the largely irrelevant account that sets up the Descartes-Gassendi option; this is space--nearly half the essay--that might have been better employed in developing her intriguing comments about simple ideas and judgment, for example. Peter Alexander has produced much brilliant work on Locke, but his paper here does not offer much light. The question is why Locke and others should have held that perfectly hard bodies are capable of rebound upon impact. Except for Descartes, whom Locke rejected, all the material, including some very late material right down to Maxwell, comes after the formation of Locke's view. Locke is at his most subtle and insightful with his doctrine of freedom; Vere Chappeli on that doctrine is no less so. The issue is the apparent incompatibility between Locke's early thesis of volitional determinism and his later view that desire can be...