THE CONCEPT OF PROPERTY IN JOHN LOCKE'S EPISTEMOLOGY AND POLITICS
Abstract
Recent scholarship has gone a long way toward placing Locke in his intellectual and historical context, and thus in coming to see the respect in which his work has a previously unacknowledged conceptual unity. There remains, however, some difficulty in reconciling the style, purpose and content of his two major works. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is usually read as primarily concerned with issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, while the Two Treatises of Government is regarded as less systematically rigorous, or at worst ad hoc political analysis. These two sides of Locke thus remain virtually unrelated fields of specialization among interpreters. My dissertation is a contribution to the project of understanding Locke's work as a connected whole; without attributing to him an attitude of scientific reductionism, I argue that the account which Locke gives of personal property in the Second Treatise bears an important relation to his account of qualities (physical properties) and personal identity in the Essay. Specifically, I try to make plausible the claim that there is in Locke a direct analogy between the property of a human person, on one hand, and the properties of a natural substance (understood in terms of the Lockean/Boylean corpuscular hypothesis) on the other. I suggest that Locke's methodological atomism in science and epistemology parallels his qualifiedly individualistic political theory, and thus that his claims about private property can be understood in terms of a broader philosophical context than is usually supposed. As part of a larger project concerning the genealogy of the concept of property and the relation between metaphysics and morality, I expect this work to have useful implications regarding much of contemporary moral and political theory. Given the historical influence of Locke's political work, a careful analysis of it in terms of its epistemological and scientific grounding should contribute to a rethinking of much twentieth century work on property and justice.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Philosophy
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