Locke on Relations

Abstract

Abstract Locke follows Boyle's basic strategy of reconciling causal powers and ontological mechanism by treating powers as relations and then offering some version of a reductive account of those relations. But this chapter argues that Locke departs from Boyle in a crucial way: on Locke's view, there is nothing for God to contribute over and above the initial source of motion. Bodies, for Locke, have passive powers to affect one another, and these powers are reducible to sets of their intrinsic qualities. This makes sense, however, only if Locke endorses a kind of conceptual foundationalism about relations, rather than relativism or pure reductivism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.