Benjamin Hill

Jolley’s slim book joins a slew of recent work on Locke’s metaphysics of persons. The two “touchy subjects” of the title were the immortality of an immaterial soul and the resurrection of the same body. Jolley’s interpretive thesis is that Locke propounded a form of weak materialism, that is, property dualism. He set this up as a corrective to the common reading that Locke was agnostic about the metaphysical state of the soul. As Jolley sees it, Locke’s thinking in support of weak materialism is spread across four works. His defense consists of tracing the arc of Locke’s thinking....

A common criticism of Locke’s ideational definition of knowledge is that it contradicts his accounts of knowledge’s reality and sensitive knowledge. Here it is argued that the ideational definiton of knowledge is compatible with knowledge of idea-independent reality. The key is Locke’s notion of the signification. Nominal agreements obtain if and only if the ideas’ descriptive contents are the ground for truth; real agreements obtain only if their total denotation are the grounds for truth. The signification of the ideas determine whether they denote real or fantastical objects. Three types of ideas, simple quality-ideas, modal ideas, and relational ideas, necessarily signify real objects. The fourth type, the ideas of substances, are real only if those particular combinations of qualitites have been perceived to co-exist. Locke’s ideas are intrinsically either real or fantastical and thus, it is argued, his models of truth and knowledge’s reality are far from typical correspondence theories