On some footnotes to Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay Of Human Understanding

ABSTRACT

Two footnotes added to the version of Catharine Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay Of Human Understanding (1702) reprinted in her Works (1751) have led to various accusations, including that she was confused and an inadequate interpreter of Locke’s moral epistemology. In particular, it is claimed that she did not recognize the gulf that separated her own intellectualist and internalist views from Locke’s more voluntarist and hedonistic position. This paper defends Cockburn’s interpretation of Locke, arguing that the evidence for Locke being a voluntarist and hedonist is not compelling, and that Cockburn’s interpretation of his moral epistemology is well grounded in the Essay Of Human Understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Catharine Cockburn
• Locke’s moral epistemology
• mixed modes
• voluntarism

ORCID

Karen Green http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5049-4462

Notes

1 For discussion of this ambiguity see Chappell, ‘Locke’s Theory’.

2 My discussion of Cockburn’s moral philosophy has been greatly facilitated by the groundbreaking articles by Martha Bolton and Patricia Sheridan (Bolton, ‘Some aspects’; Sheridan, ‘Reflection’). More importantly I am indebted to Elizabeth Sund’s PhD on Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, in which she defends the consistency of Cockburn’s philosophy. She confirmed that the footnotes in question are in Cockburn’s hand (Sund, ‘Catharine Cockburn’s’, 1 note 4, 174).

3 For her biography and account of her published and unpublished writings see Bigold, Women of Letters; Broad, Women Philosophers; Kelley, Catharine Trotter. For her philosophy, Thomas, ‘Catharine Cockburn’ and ‘Creation’; Duran, ‘Early English’; Nouvo, Christianity.

4 Sreedhar and Walsh, ‘Locke, the Law of Nature, and Polygamy’, 103–4 offer an account of how such reasoning might go.

5 Nuovo, Christianity, 265 notices an anticipation of Kant.

6 Sheridan takes the passage from Locke that she quotes to be a definition of natural law, but here he is clearly defining Divine Law (Sheridan, ‘Reflection’, 139). She may be assuming that they are one and the same, a claim made in Sreehar and Walsh, ‘Locke, the Law of Nature, and Polygamy’, 97.

7 The voluntarist and relativist interpretation of Locke, goes back at least to Shaftesbury. See his The Ainsworth Correspondence quoted in Uehlein, ‘Whichcote’, 1040. It is also developed in Colman, John Locke’s, 5.

8 Emily Thomas has recently demonstrated that there is an important difference between Clarke and Cockburn’s intellectualism (Thomas, Creation).

9 Quoted by Darwall, British Moralists, 36.

10 This misunderstanding is not shared by Darwall (Darwall, British Moralists, 44).

11 Catharine Macaulay, whose moral epistemology is very similar to Cockburn’s, probably because it is similarly based on a reading of Locke, offers a potential explanation of why God would choose this path, by claiming that God intends us to perfect ourselves by struggling to improve our understandings (Macaulay, Treatise).

12 John Locke to Catharine Trotter, 30 December 1702 in Locke, Correspondence, 7:731.

13 This objection was raised by an anonymous referee.