Giuliana Di Biase

My aim is to highlight how much some controversial aspects of Locke’s views of the human soul may be clarified by confronting them with the thought of the Neoplatonic Henry More. Sound evidence in the Essay and elsewhere suggests that More’s theory of spiritual substances was congenial to Locke, for it represented an attractive alternative both to Cartesian dualism and Hobbes’ materialism. Locke followed More in considering self-motion, not thinking, as the proper attribute of spirits...

A new conception of matter and of its elementary constituents, as well as a new idea of space and time, made seventeenth-century natural philosophy a markedly anti-Aristotelian science: the main theses of Aristotle’s Physica were refuted by the exponents of the ‘New Philosophy’, who rejected the speculative approach to the discipline typical of universities preferring experiment and observation...