5AANA003 MODERN PHILOSOPHY II: LOCKE AND BERKELEY

Transcription

1 School of Arts & Humanities Department of Philosophy 5AANA003 MODERN PHILOSOPHY II: LOCKE AND BERKELEY Syllabus Academic year 2013/4 Basic information Credits: 15 Module Tutor: Professor J. R. Milton Office: 607 Consultation time: Wednesday Semester: 1 Lecture time and venue*: Wednesday Room S 2.08 Strand Building *Please note that tutorial times and venues will be organised independently with your teaching tutor Module description (plus aims and objectives) This course will develop students familiarity with Modern Philosophy through an examination of the thought of John Locke ( ) and George Berkeley ( ). The students will gain a familiarity with the central epistemological and metaphysical claims of each philosopher, through a reading of central primary texts. Students will develop an appreciation of the historical context within which the empiricist tradition developed. The course will examine some key aspects of Locke s account and evaluate Berkeley s criticism of it as well as his own idealist philosophy. Module aims Through attention to the primary texts to communicate an understanding of the thought and core arguments of Locke and Berkeley. To convey how the problems under discussion were motivated for these thinkers. To develop a more advanced approach to the history of philosophy through engagement with more sophisticated secondary literature. To teach students to read texts in the history of philosophy with care and subject them to philosophical analysis. To gain an appreciation of the problems of interpretation that can arise in regard to figures in the history of philosophy as well as specifically philosophical challenges. Assessment methods and deadlines 1

2 Formative assessment: Two 1,500-word essays (deadlines 8 November, 20 December). Summative assessment: One 2-hour examination in May Formative essays must be completed by the deadline in order to receive feedback. This feedback is crucial for your summative assessment. Outline of lecture topics (plus suggested readings) Page 2

3 Week One 2 October: The Essay concerning Human Understanding and Locke s philosophical project Suggested reading: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book I, ch. 1 Week Two 9 October: Ideas, Innatism and Empiricism Suggested reading: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 2 4 Week Three 16 October: Primary and Secondary Qualities Suggested reading: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 8 Week Four 23 October: Substance Suggested reading: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 23 Week Five 30 October: Lockean semantics and the theory of real and nominal essences Suggested reading: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book III, chs. 3, 6 READING WEEK FIRST FORMATIVE ESSAY DUE 16.00, FRIDAY 9 NOVEMBER Week Six 13 November: Berkeley s Philosophical Project Suggested reading: Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Dialogue 1. Week Seven 20 November: Berkeley (and Locke) on Abstraction Suggested reading: Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction Week Eight 27 November: Berkeley s Arguments for Immaterialism Suggested reading: Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, 1 33 Week Nine 4 December: Objections against Immaterialism Suggested reading: Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, Week Ten 11 December: Spirits, finite and infinite Suggested reading: Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, SECOND FORMATIVE ESSAY DUE 16.00, FRIDAY 20 DECEMBER Page 3

4 Suggested essay questions Locke 1. How effective is Locke s attack on innatism? John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book I, chs. 2 4, especially ch. 2. Robert M. Adams, The Locke Leibniz debate, in Stephen Stich (ed.), Innate Ideas, pp ; and Where do our ideas come from? Descartes vs. Locke, ibid., pp Margaret Atherton, Locke and the Issue over Innateness, in Leigh S. Cauman et al. (eds), How many Questions? Essays in Honor of Sidney Morgenbesser, pp ; reprinted in Chappell (ed.), Locke, pp Jonathan Barnes, Mr. Locke s Darling Notion, Philosophical Quarterly, 22 (1972), pp Samuel C. Rickless, Locke s Polemic against Nativism, in Lex Newman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke s Essay concerning Human Understanding, ch. 2. Grenville Wall, Locke s Attack on Innate Knowledge, Philosophy, 49 (1974), pp ; reprinted in I. C. Tipton (ed.), Locke on Human Understanding. John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, ch. 2 [on the historical background]. 2. Give a brief account of Locke s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Is the distinction (a) more or less sound as it stands, (b) correct in principle, but in need of substantial revision in respect of detail, or (c) fundamentally mistaken? John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 8 [read this chapter first, but see also ch. 4, Of Solidity ]. Martha Brandt Bolton, Locke and Pyrrhonism: The Doctrine of Primary and Secondary Qualities, in Myles Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition. (Berkeley, 1983), pp E. M. Curley, Locke, Boyle and the Distinction between Primary and Secondary Qualities, Philosophical Review 81 (1972), pp ; reply by Peter Alexander, Philosophical Review 93 (1974), pp Michael Jacovides, Locke s Distinctions between Primary and Secondary Qualities, in Lex Newman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke s Essay concerning Human Understanding, ch. 4. Edwin McCann, Locke s Conception of Body, in Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke, pp A. D. Smith, Of Primary and Secondary Qualities, Philosophical Review 99 (1991), pp Robert A. Wilson, Locke s Primary Qualities, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40 (2002), pp So that of Substance, we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does (Essay, II. xiii. 19). What led Locke to say this? Should he have discarded the notion of substance altogether? John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 13, 17 20; ch. 23, esp M. R. Ayers, The Ideas of Power and Substance in Locke s Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975), pp. 1 27; reprinted in Tipton, Locke on Human Understanding, pp [This paper is a response to Bennett 1965, listed below.] M. R. Ayers, The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: The Structure of Page 4 Locke s General Philosophy, in G. A. J. Rogers (ed.), Locke s Philosophy: Content and Context, pp ; reprinted in Chappell, Locke, pp

5 Suggested additional readings Locke Locke s works Undergraduates writing weekly essays and preparing for examination questions are unlikely to need to look at anything other than the Essay concerning Human Understanding. There are many editions of this that can be used, perhaps the cheapest and most easily available being the Oxford World s Classics edition edited by Pauline Phemister, the Everyman edition edited by John Yolton and the Penguin edition edited by Roger Woolhouse. For more advanced study the only satisfactory version is the one edited by Peter Nidditch (OUP); this contains both a very accurate text and full details of all the changes that Locke made after the first (1690) edition. For those who might wish to look further afield there is a mass of interesting and still often underexploited material in the three very long letters that Locke wrote to the Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, in There is no modern edition of these, but they are included in all the old collected editions of Locke s works, of which the 1823 edition is probably the most widely cited; there is a copy of this in the college library, but the page images of this and other old editions are available online and pdfs of them can be easily downloaded using Google. Books on Locke There are so many books on Locke that no-one other than a specialist can be expected to read more than a small proportion of them. E. J. Lowe, Locke on Human Understanding (Routledge) is an elementary introduction. J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (OUP) is a little more advanced; it is often interesting but sometimes deeply unhistorical in approach. Roger Woolhouse, Locke (Harvester) pays more attention to the context in which Locke wrote, but perhaps the best introduction is Nicholas Jolley, Locke: his Philosophical Thought (OUP). Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (OUP) is lively and frequently instructive, but sometimes brutal in its interpretative approach; the same characteristics are present in his more recent Learning from Six Philosophers (OUP). The most elaborate and demanding recent book on Locke s philosophy is Michael Ayers, Locke (Routledge); it is densely written and often difficult, but is always intelligent and often rewarding. Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke (CUP) contains chapters by a number of specialists, with a very full bibliography, as does the more recent The Cambridge Companion to Locke s Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by Lex Newman. More specialised books on particular aspects of Locke s philosophy include Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke (OUP), a study of Leibniz s New Essays on Human Understanding. (Leibniz s New Essays are available in a translation by Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant (CUP); they are particularly valuable for the debate on innate ideas). Peter Alexander, Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles (CUP) has an extremely thorough though controversial discussion of the primary secondary quality distinction. Collections of articles The most recent collection (with a very good up-to-date bibliography) is Vere Chappell (ed.), Locke in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (OUP); an earlier but still valuable volume in the same series is Ian Tipton (ed.), Locke on Human Understanding. Both are aimed at the student market, as was another still older collection, D. M. Armstrong and C. B. Martin (eds), Locke and Berkeley (Macmillan). More Page 5 extensive collections of reprinted journal articles can be found in Richard Ashcraft (ed.), John Locke: Critical Assessments (Routledge), Vere Chappell (ed.), Essays on Early Modern Philosophers, vol. 9, and Udo Thiel (ed.), Locke: Epistemology and Metaphysics (Ashgate).