Locke, Substance, and the Embarrassment of an Aristotelian idea

Dr. Justin Broackes (Brown University)

Locke makes rather a mess of the Aristotelian idea of a substance. Having mischaracterized it, he first attempts to trash it. Discovering later that he cannot do without it, he ends up reaffirming and attempting to rehabilitate it, but after giving it such a battering, it's hardly suprising that his successors thought it was a tissue of confusion fit only to be abandoned or mocked. The result was, I think, that a baby was thrown out with some bathwater -- and I shall be attempting something of a rescue. Some of the material will be close reading of Locke, from 1671 to the late 1690s, as well as in the Essay; and I will be looking also at the different ways that recent historians of philosophy have tried to found whole schools and movements upon the spoils they have appropriated from these late 17th-century battles.