Content area
Full Text
G. A. J. Rogers, editor. Locke's Philosophy: Context and Content. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xiii + 257. Cloth, $49.95.
The year 1989 marked the three-hundredth anniversary of the appearance of Locke's Epistola, the Two Treatises and the Essay (dated 1690). To celebrate these, Locke's first publications, a conference was held at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1990. The papers in this volume are a selection of those presented there. The papers are elegantly introduced by the editor, who not only presents the papers, but usefully discusses the motivation, circumstances, composition, and style of Locke's Essay. The volume makes many important contributions that will be of interest to Locke scholars, of course, but also to historians of philosophy and of ideas in the period.
J. R. Milton's paper depicts the period of Locke's closest association with Oxford, from 1652 and his earliest student days to his departure for London in 1667. Uniquely among major philosophers, Locke moved to the mechanical philosophy from early interests that were predominantly in medicine. The subsequent philosophical path on which he embarked was his own creation, so we should not be surprised at the nearly three decades it took him to bring the Essay to term.
Michael Ayers tells us that he...