F. Substance

• The notion of substance plays a central role in Descartes and, especially, Spinoza.  However, Lk seems to downplay its role.
• How formed: some simple ideas usually come together and thinking that the respective qualities need a subject, we frame the idea of a substratum in which they inhere. Hence we think of a substance as a set of qualities (usually secondary) supported by a substratum. For example,  Gold: yellow, heavy, malleable, fusible, etc., plus a substratum to which these properties belong.

Problem:
secondary  or tertiary qualities are mere powers whose ontological basis is given by the texture and ultimately by the real essence. It is the primary properties making these up which inhere in the substance
• For Lk, the idea of substance is obscure:
• the substratum is unknown, an "I don't know what," and hence the idea of substance very obscure.

Problem: reification of the logical concept of subject of inherence; consequently, it's bound to be unknown.
Reply: Lk may agree, but his point is that the notion of substance is also obscure: we don't know what it is for properties to inhere and to be coinstantiated in a substance.  So, our notion of substance intensionally different from God's even if possibly extensionally equivalent to it.
NOTE: How this notion of substance is the same in any subject.
• both corporeal substance (cohesion of solid parts + capacity to transmit motion) and spiritual substance (understanding and will + capacity to originate motion) are unknown and obscure.

NOTE: Contrast with Descartes and Spinoza, especially with respect to the identification of attributes with essence or substance, which makes substance knowable.

G. identity and diversity.
Synchronic, diachronic, and a-temporal identity.
Locke says nothing on a-temporal identity, little on synchronic identity, and concentrates on diachronic identity
He adopts a relative view of identity: To determine the identity conditions of A, you must know what kind of thing A is , e.g., a man, an atom, a spirit etc. (II, 27,7)
NOTE: if he allows that individuals X and Y may be sorted as M and N even if individuals under M have different diachronic identity conditions than individuals under N, then X and Y may be the same N without being the same N.  For example, Jekyll and Hyde are the same man but different persons.
1.
Things of the same kind cannot be in same place at same time. Hence:
i. two things cannot have one beginning
ii. one thing cannot have two beginnings.
Note: ii) doesn't follow from (1) but from its converse.
2.
identity conditions of substances, modes & relations, organized things, persons:
Substances:

• God : always identical to himself, since never changes.
• Finite spirits: identity determined by spatio-temporal origins.

NOTE: not clear (can something be added to a spirit?)
• Material particle: identity preserved if no material addition or subtraction.

Organized things (organisms and machines):
Keep identity even if parts change as long as organizing principle remains the same, e.g., acorn/ oak; Theseus' ship; metamorphosis.
So, in the case of man, the identity of the soul is irrelevant, e.g., if Heliogabalus's soul were to migrate into a hog, we would not call the hog a man.

Personal identity.
A person is a rational being who can think of itself as itself at any given time; consciousness is that which makes myself myself and distinguishes me from other thinking beings.
NOTE: It's not very easy to explicate what Lk means by 'consciousness'; still, he claims that it is 'the perception of what passes in a Man's own mind' (II, 1, 19)
Hence, my personal identity stretches backwards as much as my  consciousness, i.e., my memory, does.  So, a past action is mine if I remember performing it; otherwise it isn't.
Hence:

• Sameness of person is not sameness of substance, be it material or immaterial (vs. Descartes), e.g., consciousness transfers.
• Since the person is the subject of punishment and reward, they follow the person.

NOTES:
Hence the ends of religion are saved without recourse to soul as immaterial substance.
Locke open the way for conditional immortality (denial of link between soul & PI plus possibility of thinking matter).

• forgetfulness, and yet vs. Lk, we would say it's the same person.

Reply: not same person, but same man.
• is memory a necessary requirement for PI? Isn't knowledge I did it enough? Is Lk confusing evidence for PI with PI itself?
• The drunkard who says he forgets? Shall we punish him?

Reply: yes, because he might be telling a lie.
NOTE: Lk's problem seems to be that for him PI is totally private.
• Butler's circularity objection: memory presupposes, and doesn't constitute PI; this can be seen by the fact that we need to appeal to PI in order to distinguish memory from pseudo-memory (George IV example). Lk. confuses a criterion of PI with PI  itself.

Reply (not in Lk.): q-memory of an experience e iff:
• it seems to me like a memory of e
• someone did experience e
• it is linked to e in same way (e.g., causally) in which a bona fide memory of e is linked to e.
• duplication case

Reply: rule out branching.
Triplication: looks ad hoc
• Reid's objection (the gallant officer)

Reply: appeal to psychological continuity rather than connectedness (suggested by Leibniz and not in Lk).

H. Classification.
Lk. distinguishes between nominal essence and real essence:

• nominal essence : the complex abstract idea we associate with a general term,  for example,  'gold.'

NOTE: Hence different people may have different nominal essences of gold
• real essence : that which makes a thing what it is.  For example, in the case of gold, the inner constitution (e.g., the atomic structure) on which the defining characteristics of the nominal essence of gold depend; in the case of triangle, the being a plane closed figure with three sides.

NOTE: We don't (cannot possibly?) know real essences: we lack microscopic eyes.

Substances
Locke criticizes the Aristotelian theory of classification (ATC) according to which the world is divided into mind-independent natural kinds such as gold, man, rose, etc.  For him, by contrast, "species are the workmanship of the understanding,"  that is, they are mind-dependent.
NOTE: How corpuscularianism makes the ATC problematic, since at bottom it's microstructures which determine the qualities of things.
Lk. proposes 3 arguments:

1. If ATC, then natural kinds have hard edges.  But there are monsters and ambiguous cases (III, 3, 17).

Problems:
• Deny that if ATC then hard edges;  monsters come about because of defects in matter.
• make each monster a species of its own (Leibniz)
2. things are subsumed under a species according to nominal essences, i.e., abstract ideas or concepts.  But abstract ideas are man-made.  So species are man made.

Problems:
• deny, with Plato or Aristotle, that all concepts are man-made.
• note that things fall under nominal essences because they have certain properties.  So, nature is per se  divided in natural kinds.
3. It is we who select among the many ways in which things resemble each other the ways which constitute natural kinds (the clock example) (III, 6, 39)

Problem: ok, but what if the ways we choose do correspond to the way in which nature is really at bottom divided?
Reply: we cannot know that nominal essences correspond to real essences
NOTE: Lk. adopts a conceptualist position: natural kinds are the product of the mind (abstraction), but they have a basis in reality.

Modes.
Modes are entities which don't subsist by themselves but depend upon others.  For example, triangle, gratitude, murder, parricide, etc.
Here the situation is different because for modes, the nominal essence is the real essence.  This is why in maths and in ethics we can have a science and have hard edged classification.
Problems:
The study of suicide cannot consist merely in the explication of the nominal essence of suicide.  Rather, it involves other issues, e.g., sociological ones.  So, there's a real essence of suicide which is different from the nominal essence.
The nominal essence of TBC (its symptoms) is not its real essence (the bacillus infection).
 

I. Language.
For Locke, the principal function of language is communication.  Locke's theory is:

1. words immediately "signify" (refer to) ideas in the mind of the user.

Problem: confusion between sense and reference?
Reply: Locke may hold that words signify things mediately, thorough the ideas they refer to immediately.
2. Ideas are private
3. Communication is achieved when by words the speaker excites in the hearer the same ideas he has.

Problem: there's a conflict between (2) and (3).  If ideas are private, how can they be communicated?  It must be the case that concepts are public, although the images associated with them in individual minds are private.
Reply: Type-ideas are public, while token-ideas are private

Natural-kinds terms.
For Locke (as for Frege), a natural-kind term (e.g., gold, or human) has its reference determined by its sense (the nominal essence associated with it).  So:

• if X and Y have same nominal essence (i.e., same macroscopic properties) but different real essence, then they would be in the same species, i.e., belong to the reference of the same natural-kind term
• if X and Y have same real essence, but different nominal essence (they don't have the same macroscopic properties), then they would not be in the same species, i.e., they would not belong to the reference of the same natural-kind term.

J. Knowledge
For Locke, knowledge is the perception of agreement /disagreement of ideas (IV, 1,2)
Some general points:

• although a concept empiricist (all ideas are ultimately from experience), Locke is not a knowledge-empiricist (not all knowledge can be justified by experience)
• commitment to epistemological individualism: knowing P entails being able to justify P.  Hence, rejection of mere appeals to authority: as we cannot see with another's eyes, so we cannot know with another's understanding ((I, 4, 23).
• rejection of scholastic formalism: the best knowledge is intuitive, a kind of mental seeing.  Even in demonstration, one must see the conceptual connections.
• psychologism: the objects of propositional knowledge are mental entities, i.e., ideas viewed objectively, or better the objective contents of ideas.  Our knowledge extends no further than our ideas.

Four types of agreement/disagreement:

1. identity/diversity: whether an idea same or different from another, e.g., yellow isn't green (idea of?)
2. relation: whether two ideas stand in a certain relation to each other e.g., two triangles of equal base and same height have same area.

NOTE: Lk seems to have in mind relations of entailment or probability.
3. necessary coexistence: whether some idea always come together, e.g., nominal essence of iron and idea of being magnetizable.
4. real existence: whether idea depicts existing thing, e.g., God exists.

1. Intuitive (intuition): clear and certain, e.g. blue is blue; blue isn't green; I exist.
2. Demonstrative (reason): a chain of intuitive pieces of knowledge; it's certain but not as clear as intuitive: ex. geometrical theorems; God exists
3. Sensitive (sensation): neither as clear nor certain as (1) and (2): ex. knowledge of external world.

1. Identity/diversity: Extends as far as our ideas, since of any two ideas we can tell whether they are the same or not (objectively viewed).

2. Necessary coexistence:

• Extends to few ideas, since there is no obvious connection between simple ideas. We base our beliefs on brute experience (lack of theoretical understanding).  For example, both necessary connection among secondary qualities (say, yellowness, malleability, heaviness, fusibility, etc., with solubility in acqua regia), and between them and microstructures unknown.
• Lk's pessimism about science and our knowledge of the world:
• we don't know real essences, and perhaps never will.

NOTE: Not clear why: perhaps because we lack microscopic eyes.
• even if we did, we couldn't deduce the macroproperties (IV,3,12)
• although action at a distance is unintelligible, Newton has shown that it takes place

NOTE: Newton famously denied this.
• Lk's pessimism about knowledge of spirits

NOTE: Contrast with Descartes

Wide and expanding, since it amounts to finding intermediate ideas between abstract ideas. Ex. Maths & Morality.
Problem: is this true of Morality:? Can we agree on real definitions?  Note how Locke in fact doesn't give a science of morality: much of what he gives us amounts to "trifling" (definitional) knowledge (e.g., IV, 3, 18)

Intuitive (my own existence); demonstrative (existence of God); sensitive (existence of finite things)
Problem: Existence is not an idea here.

Certain knowledge can be trifling or instructive:

• trifling: a derivation  of Y from a complex idea explicitly containing Y.  For example, the claim that gold is yellow is trifling because the idea of yellow is contained in the nominal essence of gold.
• instructive: a  derivation  of Y from a complex idea not explicitly containing Y; hence, the derivation is not trivial

NOTE: presumably, for Locke maths and morality involve some instructive knowledge.

• As far as we know, there is no contradiction in the notion of thinking matter

NOTE: the point might be of epistemic possibility (which doesn't entail logical possibility even relative to our ideas), or logical possibility relative to our own ideas (which doesn't entail logical possibility simpliciter even if our ideas here at stake are extensionally equivalent with God's), or logical possibility simpliciter (i.e. logical possibility in relation to God's ideas).
• For all we know, God can (does?) give thought to properly fitted material systems.

NOTE: at times he seems to think this applies to animals (LW IV, 466)
• Moreover, since God has inexplicably annexed to matter in motion the capacity to produce ideas in us, he could give matter the capacity to think.

Our problem is that we don't have a satisfactory idea of thought (we don't know what thought consists in).
NOTES:
• Compare to Malebranche and contrast with Descartes and Clarke
• Is our ignorance of the nature of thought compatible with the idea that the mind is transparent?

K. The reality of knowledge
Since our knowledge extends not farther than ideas, is it chimerical, i.e. restricted to the ideal side of the veil of perception?
Not as far as there is conformity between ideas and the things they stand for.  Such conformity certainly exists in the case of

• simple ideas because, since the mind is passive, they are the result of causal activity of things on us.

Problems:
• given Lk's remarks about lack of conformity between secondary qualities  and their ideas, what sort of knowledge is this?
• compare with Descartes' views about extension as clear & distinct
• complex ideas not of substances, since they must conform merely to themselves (e.g., mathematical and moral ideas).  Here, nominal essence and real essence coincide

NOTE: both trifling and instructive knowledge can be real knowledge: "a triangle has 3 sides" is both trifling and real; "the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles" is both instructive and real.

Knowledge of existent things
There are three things at issue: 1) our existence; 2) the existence of God; 3) the existence of the external world.

1.
Knowledge of my own existence is certain and intuitive.
Problem: does intuition go beyond ideas here?

2.
Knowledge of God's existence: certain and demonstrative.
The proof a version of the Cosmological Argument.  It has  two stages: A) God exists; B) God is immaterial.

• God exists:
1. I exist and I think
2. nothing cannot be the cause of anything, i.e.,  every event or state of affair has a cause.
3. Hence, there must always have been something, otherwise there would be nothing now.

Problem: Lk doesn't seem to realize that this something needn't be the (numerically) same thing.
4. a cause must have formally or eminently all that is in the effect.

NOTE: Descartes' third meditation.
5. hence, the cause of my existence must have power, thought, etc., to the heighest degree, i.e., it is God.

Problem: why to the highest degree?
• God is immaterial:

Rationale: only an immaterial substance can produce thought since:
• even if matter (which cannot produce motion) were in motion from eternity, it could only push, knock other matter, not produce thought

Problem: But Lk also claims that we don't know what thought consists in.
Reply: perhaps he knows enough to exclude that thought be produced by matter.
• since matter is not one thing, but partes extra partes, there would be an infinity of consciousness, not one material thinking God.

Problem: so what? A committee could be my cause.
NOTE: Lk rejects the ontological argument: can't go from thought to reality

• The fact that neither a blind man nor one with sight but in the dark can see things guarantees that both the senses and something else is needed to cause sensation
• Ideas from sense are vivid and unavoidable

NOTE: similar to Descartes in Meditation VI
• Pain and pleasure accompany actual sensations and not memories of them

Problem: this only shows that sensation is different from memory or imagination
• The senses confirm each other.

Problem (raised by Lk. himself): not shown that dream hypothesis is wrong
Reply: if we always dream, then it makes no difference to our lives; this doubt is trifling. moreover, This not an issue on which we can gain absolute certainty.
NOTE: Lk points out that we know the existence of other spirits from faith alone.

• Extreme fideism: "Credo quia impossibile," recently revived by Pascal
• Moderate fideism: Appeal to the authority and tradition of the Church to adjudicate religious issues in the light of reason's inability to do so.
• Enthusiasm: the belief in one's authority in religious matters because of one's infusion by the Holy Ghost.
• Deism, which accepted natural religion, but rejected of revelation and supernatural (Mysteries), e.g., vergin birth , the resurrection from the dead, the idea that Christ is the Messiah.
• Socinianism, which was an extreme form of deism and denied Christ's divinity, God's foreknowledge, and unconditional immortality.

• Reason is the inferring or demonstrating of certain or probable truths from the ideas gotten through experience.  With respect to reason, statements can be divided into three categories:
1. statements in accordance with reason, i.e., truths arrivable at by reason.
2. statements contrary to reason, i.e.,  inconsistent with what we know to be true, e.g., more than one God; trinity (probably)
3. statements above reason, i.e., consistent with what we know to be true, but unarrivable by reason. ex. resurrection; divinity of Christ; virgin birth.
• Faith is the acceptance of revelation.  For Lk:
1. the proper realm of faith is statements above reason. Hence faith goes beyond reason but cannot contradict it.
2. One must have reasons for believing that alleged revelation is true revelation. Ex. immoral precepts disqualify, since reason tells us God is good. Hence, importance of the rational study of the sources of revelation: textual exegesis of Scriptures

NOTE: So, Locke accepts that if P is divinely revealed we ought to accept it; however, he wants proof that P is divinely revealed.
3. Reason demands the rejection of credo quia impossibile and of enthusiasm.

NOTE: Since Lk. accepts revelation, he isn't a deist; nor is he a Socinian (he accepts the divinity of Christ).