John Locke and the Sceptics

Abstract

Richard Popkin’s History ofi Scepticism, on which he is now engaged on a revised and expanded third edition, extending it both backward and forward in time as well as adding new material in the middle, is for me one of the most exciting books on the history of philosophy to have been published in the last one hundred years. The latest edition, when it is finished, will take us from Savonarola to Bayle: from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. The first two editions of Popkin’s work do not consider any of the classic British Empiricists. In the second edition he gestures towards them: “One could … follow the sceptical themes as they entered English philosophy in Hobbes, Boyle and Locke, the full-fledged scepticism of Glanvill, and then Berkeley’s heroic efforts to refute scepticism, and the collapse of his efforts into Hume’s Pyrrhonism”.¹ But, in that second edition, he did not stop to explore. Instead, he passed on to consider Isaac La Peyrère and religious scepticism. The omission might seem surprising, given the obvious place that the British thinkers have in the canon of western philosophy, and given the strong links between much of their thought and sceptical themes. We are promised that this lacuna will in part be rectified in the third edition but in the meanwhile I offer some further thoughts on the matter as it relates to John Locke²