Locke on Persons and Other Kinds of Substances

Locke's commentators are divided about whether Locke thinks that the idea of a person is a substance idea or a mode idea. I use Locke's theory of kinds to argue for an intermediate interpretation on which the idea of a person is a substance idea that contains a mode idea. As a result, while proponents of the substance interpretation correctly claim that ‘person’ designates a kind of substance, proponents of the mode interpretation are nonetheless correct in insisting that mode ideas play an important role in Locke's account of persons and personal identity.     

Constitutivism,Error, and Moral Responsibility in Bishop Butler's Ethics

In his writings on moral philosophy, Bishop Joseph Butler adopts an identifiably “constitutivist” strategy because he seeks to ground normativity in features of agency. Butler's constitutivist strategy deserves our attention both because he is an influential precursor to much modern moral philosophy and because it sheds light on current debates about constitutivism. For example, Butler's approach can easily satisfy the “error constraint” that is often thought to derail modern constitutivist approaches. It does this by defining actions relative to the kind of being who performs them, instead of relative to the circumstances of their performance. This gives Butler a conceptually stable account of something that is both fully an action yet morally bad, for which an agent might be held morally responsible. Should modern constitutivists wish to model their views on Butler's in order to satisfy the error constraint, they need not adopt all his theological and other commitments, but they will have to avoid the currently popular constitutivist strategy of deriving normative force from the inescapability of a given principle.     

True Identities: From Performativity to Festival

Some feminists have criticized Judith Butler's theory of performativity for providing an insufficient account of agency. In this article I first defend her against such charges by appealing to two themes central to Hans‐Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. I compare her emphasis on the sociohistorical nature of agency with Gadamer's insistence on the historical nature of knowledge, and I examine the significance Butler assigns to repetition and note its affinities with Gadamer's conception of play. In the final part of the article I argue that in spite of providing an adequate account of agency, Butler's theory of performativity provides no way to allow us to evaluate performances. I show how Gadamer's account of festival, which builds on his concept of play, is useful in helping us make sense of how we might delineate true from false performances, and thus identities.     

THE BIBLICAL ROOTS OF LOCKE'S THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

Locke's consciousness‐based theory of personal identity resulted not only from his agnosticism on substance, but also from his biblical theology. This theory was intended to complement and sustain Locke's moral and theological commitments to a system of otherworldly rewards and sanctions as revealed in Scripture. Moreover, he inferred mortalist ideas from the Bible, rejecting the resurrection of the same body and maintaining that the soul dies at physical death and will be resurrected by divine miracle. Accordingly, personal identity is neither in the soul, nor in the body, nor in a union of soul and body. To Locke, personal identity is in consciousness, which, extending “backwards to any past Action or Thought,” enables the self, both in this life and upon resurrection for the Last Judgment, to recognize that “it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done” (Essay II.xxvii.9).     

LOCKE ON SENSITIVE KNOWLEDGE AND THE VEIL OF PERCEPTION – FOUR MISCONCEPTIONS1

Abstract: Interpreters of Locke's Essay are divided over whether to attribute to him a Representational Theory of Perception (RTP). Those who object to an RTP interpretation cite (among other things) Locke's Book IV account of sensitive knowledge, contending that the account is incompatible with RTP. The aim of this paper is to rebut this kind of objection – to defend an RTP reading of the relevant Book IV passages. Specifically, I address four influential assumptions (about sensitive knowledge) cited by opponents of an RTP interpretation and argue that in each case the assumption is false.     

The Idea of Power and Locke's Taxonomy of Ideas

Locke's account of the idea of power is thought to be seriously problematic. Commentators allege (1) that the idea of power causes problems for Locke's taxonomy of ideas, (2) that it is defined circularly, and (3) that, contrary to Locke's claims, it cannot be acquired in experience. This paper defends Locke's account. Previous commentators have assumed that there is only one idea of power. But close attention to Locke's text, combined with background features of his theory of ideas, supports the drawing of a distinction between four different ideas of power. The paper describes each idea and its role in the Essay. It then argues that this distinction can help Locke to avoid the traditional criticisms.     

Lockean Empathy

This paper offers an epistemic defense of empathy, drawing on John Locke's theory of ideas. Locke held that ideas of shape, unlike ideas of color, had a distinctive value: resembling qualities in their objects. I argue that the same is true of empathy, as when someone is pained by someone's pain. This means that empathy has the same epistemic value or objectivity that Locke and other early modern philosophers assigned to veridical perceptions of shape. For this to hold, pain and pleasure must be a primary quality of the mind, just as shape is a primary quality of bodies. Though Locke did not make that claim, I argue that pain and pleasure satisfy his criteria for primary qualities. I consider several objections to the analogy between empathy and shape‐perception and show how Locke's theory has resources for answering them. In addition, the claim that empathetic ideas are object‐matching sidesteps Berkeley's influential objection to Locke's theory of resemblance. I conclude by briefly considering the prospects for a similar defense of empathy in contemporary terms.     

Curriculum Vitae: Embodied Ethics at the Seams of Intelligibility

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” (Butler 2001a) and “Giving an Account of Oneself” (Butler 2001b). In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the (necessary) silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical‐aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts‐informed representations in academic work.     

Animalism Versus Lockeanism: A Current Controversy

My purpose is to explore the possible lines of reply available to a defender of the neo-Lockean position on personal identity in response to the recently popular 'animalist' objection. I compare the animalist objection with an objection made to Locke by Bishop Butler, Thomas Reid and, in our own day, Sydney Shoemaker. I argue that the only possible response available to a defender of Locke against the Butler–Reid–Shoemaker objection is to reject Locke's official definition of a person as a thinking, intelligent thing and replace it with the concept of the self – the object of self-reference – and that this response is equally obligatory for the neo-Lockean in replying to the animalist. I explore other possibilities, including the position that there is no sense in talking about personal identity at all.     

Judith Butler's Critique of Violence and the Legacy of Monique Wittig

Although Judith Butler's theorization of violence has begun to receive growing scholarly attention, the feminist theoretical background of her notion of violence remains unexplored. In order to fill this lacuna, this article explicates the feminist genealogy of Butler's notion of violence. I argue that Butler's theorization of violence can be traced back to Gender Trouble, to her discussion of Monique Wittig's argument that the binary categorization of sex can be conceived as a form of discursive violence. I contend, first, that Butler starts to develop her notion of “gender violence” on the basis of her reading of Wittig, and second, that Butler's more recent writings on military violence and the ethics of nonviolence build on her early interpretation of Wittig. On the basis of my reading, I suggest, in contrast to recent criticism, that Butler's later critique of violence is not at odds with but rather expands upon her prior work on violence.     

Agency,Signification, and Temporality

This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.     

Subjected Subjects? On Judith Butler's Paradox of Interpellation

Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre‐existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There is a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power‐ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always‐already the embodiment of the field of society‐power‐ideology.     

Body and Language: Butler,Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard on the Speaking Embodied Subject

In this article three viewpoints on the relation of body and language are discussed: the poststructuralist viewpoint of Judith Butler, the phenomenological viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the postmodernist viewpoint of Jean-François Lyotard. The reason juxtaposing for these three accounts is twofold. First, the topic requires a combination of post-structuralist and phenomenological insights, and second, the accounts are supplementary. Butler's account raises questions that can be answered with the help of Merleau-Ponty's work. Lyotard's anthropology of the inhuman offers a perspective of finitude that is missing in the other two. The aim of the article is to outline the necessary ingredients of an adequate conception of the speaking embodied subject.     

LOCKE,SUSPENSION OF DESIRE,AND THE REMOTE GOOD

The chapter ‘Of power“ of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a very fine discussion of agency and a very complex piece of philosophy. It is the result of the superimposition of at least three layers of text (those of the first, second and fifth editions of the Essay), expressive of widely differing views of the same matters. The argument concerning agency and free will that it puts forward (as it now stands, reporting Locke's last word on the subject) is thus beset with problems, and even inconsistencies. But these textual and analytical difficulties should not hide from us the relevance and, in a way, the deep coherence of Locke's philosophy of action. In what follows, I will attempt to cast some light on this complicated interpretive and conceptual matter, by a careful reading of some parts of Locke's discussion. The first section shows how accounting for the evaluation and choice of remote goods, in terms of their real value and in preference to smaller, nearer ones, is a crucial problem for Locke's philosophy of action. The second section reads Locke's move from an internalist to an externalist view of motivation as a first, conceptually complex step towards such an account; and shows how this is linked to a change in the concept of will. The third and fourth sections reconstruct Locke's account (a pattern of suspension and examination of occurrent desire); discuss the role of the motivational and normative concept of happiness; and cast some doubt on the consistency of Locke's position.     

Spilling All Over the “Wide Fields of Our Passions”: Frye,Butler, Wittgenstein and the Context(s) of Attention,Intention and Identity (Or: From Arm Wrestling Duck to Abject Being to Lesbian Feminist)

I argue for a Wittgensteinian reading of Judith Butler's performative conception of identity in light of Marilyn Frye's analysis of lesbian as nonexistent and Butler's analysis of abject. I suggest that the attempt to articulate a performative lesbian identity must take seriously the contexts within which abjection is vital to maintaining gender, exposing the intimate link between context and the formulation of intention, and shedding light on possible lesbian identities irreducible to abjection.     

Reflection,Nature, and Moral Law: The Extent of Catharine Cockburn's Lockeanism in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay

This essay examines Catharine Cockburn's moral philosophy as it is developed in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. In this work, Cockburn argues that Locke's epistemological principles provide a foundation for the knowledge of natural law. Sheridan suggests that Cockburn's objective in defending Locke's moral epistemology was conditioned by her own prior commitment to a significantly un‐Lockean theory of morality. In exploring Cockburn's views on morality in terms of their divergence from Locke's, the author hopes to underscore the extent of Cockburn's intellectual independence and her philosophical creativity.     

Butler and Heidegger: On the Relation between Freedom and Marginalization

Though the names “Judith Butler” and “Martin Heidegger” rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship, the critical encounter between these philosophers might help us conceptualize the relationship between freedom and marginalization. In this paper, I will read Butler from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time and claim that what Butler's philosophy suggests is the radical dependency of one's freedom on the cultural resuscitation of socially murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will claim that the socially sanctioned subject's freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other's freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other's freedom is dependent on the socially sanctioned subject's freedom.     

Categories by which we try to live

Categories We Live By makes several claims about Judith Butler's Gender Trouble which Butler seeks to contest, while remaining in fundamental agreement with most of the conclusions in Asta Sveinsdottir's book. At issue is whether or not performativity can rightly be restricted to what is called an exercitive in J. L. Austin's sense, whether Butler is a radical constructivist or a qualified one, and whether unauthorized speech acts have a power to bring a reality into being that is different from those authorized by legal regimes. Along the way, Butler suggest that establishing facts takes place within variable historical schemes and that this argument is neither a denial or facts nor of materiality. Finally, an individualist idea of freedom is subject to criticism in order to make way for an historically constrained freedom, collective in nature.