Damascene Philosophy

Thinkers

John Locke

1632 – 1704 · Wrington, England

The empiricist who argued that the mind starts as a blank slate and that personal identity is a matter of consciousness and memory.

Key ideas

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argued that there are no innate ideas. All our ideas come from experience, through the senses or reflection on our own minds. This made him a founding figure of empiricism.

His chapter on identity, added in 1694, gave the first modern theory of personal identity. What makes you the same person over time is not the same body or even the same soul, but the same consciousness, extended back by memory. His story of a prince's consciousness entering a cobbler's body is the ancestor of every body-swap thought experiment, and the debates in personal identity and memory and identity start here.

He also discussed a man in a locked room who chooses to stay, not knowing the door is locked, an early version of the idea behind Frankfurt cases. His political writing on natural rights and government by consent shaped the American and French revolutions.

“A thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxvii.9, on what a person is

Life, briefly

Locke studied and taught at Oxford, trained in medicine, and became physician and adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading opponent of the king. Political danger drove him into exile in the Netherlands in 1683. He returned after the Revolution of 1688 and published his major works almost at once.

Major works

  • An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
  • Two Treatises of Government (1689)
  • A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)

Schools of thought

Empiricism

Appears in

Question

Can you be free in a determined universe?

Perhaps freedom never meant escaping causes. Perhaps it means acting from your own reasons, which can be caused like anything else.

Question

Why is there something it is like to be you?

Science can explain what the brain does. The hard problem asks why any of that doing is accompanied by experience at all.

Question

Are you the same person you were at eight?

Almost every cell, belief and memory has changed. Something makes that child you. The question is what.

Question

Are you your memories?

John Locke argued that you extend exactly as far back as you can remember. The idea is powerful, and it has holes you could drive a carriage through.

Thought experiment

Could you be responsible without any alternatives?

A hidden device would have forced your choice, but it never activates, because you choose that way on your own. Were you free?

Thought experiment

The Ship of Theseus

Replace a ship's planks one at a time until none of the originals remain. Is it the same ship? And if someone builds a second ship from the old planks, which one is the original?

Thought experiment

Would you step into the teleporter?

It scans you, destroys your body, and builds a perfect copy on Mars a moment later. The copy wakes up remembering stepping in. Did you travel, or did you die?

Further reading