Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Materialism from Hobbes to Locke by Stewart DuncanThomas HoldenStewart Duncan. Materialism from Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 248. Hardback, $80.00.Stewart Duncan’s Materialism from Hobbes to Locke presents a tightly focused study of the seventeenth-century English debate over materialism in the philosophy of mind, from Hobbes’s uncompromising rejection of incorporeal substance as a contradiction in terms through to Locke’s cautious calibrations around the metaphysics of mind and body. Along the way, Duncan considers Hobbes’s exchange with Descartes and examines the contributions of a handful of mid- and late seventeenth-century figures, including those of the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth writing in scandalized reaction to Hobbes, and that of the more bohemian figure Margaret Cavendish, with her own panpsychist variation of materialism. An epilogue considers some of Locke’s more radical self-described followers in the early eighteenth century, with their own iteration of materialist-inclined pseudo-Lockean speculations.Duncan’s book will take its place as an essential study of the debate over materialism and the metaphysics of mind in early modern England. It is particularly illuminating when examining the ways in which Locke’s own treatment of materialism is shaped both positively and negatively by the intervening responses to Hobbes. Locke himself is not always terribly scrupulous about registering his own influences, and—at least when read from our distance—can seem to present his monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding more as an achievement of epic psychological introspection and experimental self-examination than a series of moves in a complex dialogue with other contemporary figures. Duncan brings significant parts of that subtextual dialogue back into view, shedding light on Locke’s cautious agnosticism about materialism through plausible treatment of his likeliest sources. In attending closely to Locke’s own influences, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke makes a substantial contribution to the project of naturalizing Locke that one also sees advanced in recent scholarship by Hannah Dawson, Nicholas Jolley, and Antonia LoLordo. And Duncan’s approach yields striking results, as when he intervenes compellingly in the well-known debate between Jonathan Bennett and Michael Ayers over whether Locke’s theory of substance commits him to a pure propertyless substratum or merely a material microstructure that is responsible for the empirically observable properties of objects. Ayers had rejected the pure substratum view as absurd and unthinkable for Locke. But Duncan shows that More had explicitly endorsed just such a theory and was very plausibly one of Locke’s sources. The hypothesis of a pure propertyless substratum was then at least a thinkable option for Locke, and it is arguable that his own view of substance was in part inspired by More.Throughout the book, Duncan’s spotlight is on the question of the metaphysical basis of the human mind, consciousness, and thought, together with the analogous question for other minds, whether animal, angelic, or divine. Most of the time, this focus on the metaphysics of mind tracks well with the leading concerns and arguments of the figures under discussion, and it helps give Duncan’s history an engaging narrative course. But it is arguable that for Hobbes, at least, materialism was as much a research program and methodological manifesto for what we would now call the natural sciences as it was an answer to a question about the nature of the conscious mind. Questions about the explanatory reach of materialism in natural philosophy—including questions about the nature of space and time, cohesion, elasticity, the existence of a vacuum, and the nature of active forces and materially penetrable fields—arise here only obliquely, if at all, as and when they inform the central question of mind.Duncan’s discussion is circumscribed in one other way as well. The “from Hobbes to Locke” of his title should not be taken as simply declaring the book’s chronological framework—as specifying the time period to be examined, bookended by each of these important figures. It should also be read causally, developmentally, genealogically: from Hobbes to Locke. Duncan’s book “is about the reactions to Hobbes’s materialism” (5, emphasis added), particularly the reactions in England (and...