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Locke and French Materialism (review)
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 30, Number 4, October 1992
- pp. 613-615
- 10.1353/hph.1992.0063
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
BOOK REVIEWS 613 beset reductionism. I am sorry, however, that she did not choose to quote one of the rare texts that I have come across where Descartes explicitly mentions reduction. The passage occurs in his notebook for the years i619-169I, and is a reference to the celebrated mnemonist Lambert Schenkel to whom Descartes paid the unusual compliment of reading his book on the art of memory. "I thought," writes Descartes, "of an easy way of making myself master of all I discovered through the imagination. This would be done through the reduction of things to their causes. Since all can be reducedto one it is obviously not necessary to remember all the sciences." Descartes then offers an interesting improvement of the way that images can be constructed to assist in the recollection of the causal chain. There are many kinds of reductions in Descartes, some are successful, like the one he performs with his compass in the Geometry,others are less felicitous, like the assimilation of animals to machines, others again belie experimental data, like the reduction of impact to inelastic collision. Emily Groshoiz helps us to understand some of the problems involved, and raises a number of lively issues that should keep twentieth-century reductionists on their mettle. WILLIAM R. SHEA McGiU Centrefor Medicine, Ethics and Law John W. Yolton. Locke and French Materialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 199,. Pp. 239. Cloth, $55.oo. A colleague of mine has a thesis to the effect that conjunctions in tides of philosophical works should be read as copulas. (Consider Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, or Bergmann , Logic and Reality, but also Tolstoy, War and Peace, or Dostoievski, Crime and Punishment.) The question before us, then, may be whether there is anything to be found in eighteenth-century French materialism that is not already in Locke. Indeed, there is a single text, "a conceptual aside" (,o9) that Yolton uses in an attempt to focus an enormous amount of material from the books, journal articles, clandestine tracts and correspondence that debated the issue, and the issues surrounding, whether matter might think. Most notably, Voltaire in the thirteenth of his Letters concerning the English Nation drew attention to 4.3.6 of the Essay, in which Locke suggests that, for all we know, God has "given to some Systems of Matter, fitly disposed, a power to think and perceive." Yolton's Thinking Matter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) conveyed the British material generated by Locke's suggestion, and here he does the same for the French. It seems that, whether properly or not, Locke's suggestion became part of a larger doctrinal package that helps to explain the prominence gained by the suggestion. Especially because of the work of Condillac, Locke was best known as the supposed source for sensationalism, which was interpreted as involving a causal theory of perception . That bodies should act on the mind--that they should have a "physical influence" on it, as it was put--combined with Locke's suggestion to make him an unwitting supporter of outright materialism. The linkage was reinforced by the quantity of detail being supplied, however fancifully, by work in the physiology of perception. The 614 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER 1992 temptation, no less irresistible than fallacious, was to reduce mental events to the physical events which they were initially invoked to explain. It therefore should come as less of a surprise to learn that the two alternatives to physical influence on the mind-body relation were occasionalism and the preestablished harmony. In a remarkable number of publications from this period, materialism was thought to be blocked only by denying that matter can be a real cause of perceptions. (The questions as to whether matter can be a real cause of anything, and whether mind can be a real cause of physical events, are different and more difficult questions in this literature.) That bodily events cause perceptions, that only God upon occasion of bodily events causes perceptions, and that perceptions are built into the soul to correlate with bodily events, are thus the "three hypotheses" repeatedly referred to by this literature. Yohon convincingly shows that, while the pre...