From one for one

Jean H. Hagstrum Eros and Vision: the Restoration to Romanticism has a generous note to the work of an other scholar. It is a classy reference. Deserves to be quoted in full, an example of the threads spun from one scholar for another. (page 247, note 31)

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 341. I believe it is valid to associate Locke's view of the mind with sensibility, but I recognize that this association rests on a more fundamental matter, Locke's use of consciousness as the criterion of personal identity. For a searching discussion of this belief, the background for it, and the reactions to it, see Christopher Fox, "Locke and the Scriblerians: the Discussion of Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England," Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (Fall 1982): 1-25. The Lockean definition of the self is not an easy concept to derive from his work. Observe in Essay, pp. 2, 24-25, 27, how he wavers between identifying it with substance and saying it comes and goes with consciousness. See the useful article by David P. Behan, "Locke on Persons and Personal Identity" in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1979): 53-75. For a comprehensive and persuasive study of personal identity and consciousness in the early eighteenth century, see Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)

And so for day 253
24.08.2007