Locke on Substance Kinds and Human Minds

Locke is explicitly agnostic about whether human minds are material or immaterial and claims there is no contradiction in supposing that God might have given a system of matter fitly disposed some degree of thought. Despite this agnosticism, many scholars have argued that Locke is implicitly inclined toward either materialism or immaterialism. Interpreting Locke as a consistent nominalist about substance kinds, I contend that his substance nominalism runs deeper than his apparent metaphysical inclinations and that his ontological and idea-theoretical commitments motivate a principled neutrality regarding the substantial basis of things we categorize as “thinking” or “material.” According to Locke, the sortal terms “mind” and “matter,” which figure prominently in competing propositions that human minds are material or immaterial, stand for complex ideas of substance kinds. But such ideas, on Locke’s analysis, are strictly limited: they are always to some degree obscure, always inadequate to the task of perfectly representing their archetypes, and always false when supposed to conform to the real essences of substances. I evaluate four competing arguments for Locke’s supposed metaphysical inclinations in light of these representational limits and argue that each is premised on a conflation between real and nominal essences.

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Time: 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Hegeman 204A

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