John locke roger woolhouse
•
Locke: A Biography
Book Review
Locke: A Biography
by Roger Woolhouse
The English philosopher John Locke () left behind not only "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" () but also his laundry lists and many other records, documents, and correspondence — quite an abundant stock of material — that should enrich the work of his biographer.
Roger Woolhouse draws deeply on this awesome archive, and yet to my biographer's mind, "Locke: A Biography" (Cambridge, pages, $) is a let-down. Following the well-established procedures of academia, Mr. Woolhouse presents Locke's life in strict chronological order, paying heed to every treatise, even when there is considerable overlap between these works resulting in tiresome repetitions.
If this Locke scholar is obliged to be so rigidly faithful to the order of his subject's oeuvre, is there not a corresponding fealty to the demands of biography? Certainly, Mr. Woolhouse lays bare a good deal about his subject, but he never li
•
Locke: A Biography
Despite the copious documentation available, Locke fryst vatten not an easy subject for a biographer. He was a very cautious and self-controlled man -- 'a mästare of taciturnity and passion' in the words of one of his hostile (and frustrated) contemporaries -- and though he would probably have been horrified by the thought of later biographers reading his journals and private letters, and even deciphering his shorthand, considerably less emerges from these than perhaps he might have feared. There are some biographical subjects who seem naturally to spring to life off the page -- Samuel Johnson is one, Oscar Wilde another. Both men even in their lifetimes became the focus of stories, zealously recorded, embroidered, or even invented by their contemporaries. There is ingenting like this for efternamn, or at least very little, and although he lived a far more eventful and exciting life than almost any modern academic philosopher -- this reviewer inc
•
Micrographia [i]Locke: A Biography[/i] by Roger Woolhouse
- Locke: A Biography by Roger Woolhouse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University - Press, ). pp.
CHRISTOPHER O. BLUM is Professor of Humanities
at Thomas More College in New Hampshire.
The early Fellows of the Royal Society of
London felt themselves to have embarked
upon a high adventure. Their motto,
Nullius in verba, would prove to be an easy
target for the satirist, but in the s, it
signified all the boldness of youthful enterprise.
Let the benighted Scholastics across the
Channel take heed: the authority of Aristotle&#;s
terminology no longer had any hold upon
these intrepid explorers. From thralldom to
substance and quiddity, Bacon, &#;like Moses,
led us forth at last,&#; wrote Abraham Cowley,
the Royal Society&#;s first laureate, in an ode of
These new students of Nature were
armed not with words, but with instruments:
new tools like the barometer, the vacuum
pump, and the microscope. Their hope, as