E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

John Locke is widely acknowledged as the most important figure in the history of English philosophy and _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ is his greatest intellectual work, emphasising the importance of experience for the formation of knowledge. The _Routledge Guidebook to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ introduces the major themes of Locke’s great book and serves as a companion to this key work, examining: The context of Locke’s work and the background to his writing Each part of the text in relation to its goals, meaning and impact The reception of the book when it was first seen by the world The relevance of Locke’s work to philosophy today, its legacy and influence With further reading suggested throughout, this text follows Locke’s original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work.

Objects which philosophers have traditionally categorized as abstract are standardly referred to by complex noun phrases of certain canonical forms, such as ‘the set of Fs’, ‘the number of Fs’, ‘the proposition that P’, and ‘the property of being F’. It is no accident that such noun phrases are well-suited to appear in ‘Fregean’ identity-criteria, or ‘abstraction’ principles, for which Frege’s criterion of identity for cardinal numbers provides the paradigm. Notoriously, such principlesare apt to create paradoxes, and the most intuitively plausible ‘Fregean’ identity-criterion for properties is afflicted by this problem. In this case, it may be possible to overcome the difficulty by modifying the criterion in a way which requires an independent account of the existence-conditions of properties, but it appears that such a strategy demands acceptance of the doctrine of immanent realism—the view that a property exists only if it is exemplified by some object.

This chapter formulates and argues for a version of the causal theory of perception that is incompatible with disjunctivism, and defends it against criticisms typically levelled at such a theory by disjunctivists, such as that it promotes scepticism and that it is unfaithful to the phenomenology of perception. It argues that far from disjunctivism being ontologically less extravagant than that causal theory of perception, the reverse is true, so that all things considered, the causal theory of perception is the superior theory and disjunctivism in the philosophy of perception should be rejected.