October 26, 2004

Locke tercentenary

Posted by Chris

This year is the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke and since he was born in Wrington and brought up in Pensford (both small villages near Bristol) we’ve been doing our bit to celebrate. On Saturday we had a one-day conference aimed mainly at schoolchildren and last night I gave an evening class on his political thought (attended by, among others, our polymathically perverse commenter Count Des von Bladet who asked a question about Levi-Strauss that I didn’t understand). There’s also been a flurry of newspaper articles, of which the latest is from Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian .

Posted on October 26, 2004 02:07 PM UTC
Comments

On Saturday we had a one-day conference aimed mainly at schoolchildren

I hope someone said, “Locke thought everyone was like you lot: nasty, brutish — and short.”

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 26, 2004 03:31 PM

Thanks for the link - I am hoping to put my beloved homeland of Latveria on the intellectual map in the way “Slavering” Slavoj Zizek has done for Slovenia, but the Latverian tradition in philosophy is of course quite different from that of the English-speaking world.

Kieran: He also played a mean game of Calvin-ball, but for some reason no one ever mentions that either…

Posted by des von bladet · October 26, 2004 03:48 PM

I thought Hobbes was the nasty, brutish and short one?

To be Lockean, you’d have to judge the kids’ thoughts by their actions, which would be reasonable but would spoil the joke…

Posted by john b · October 26, 2004 05:30 PM

“Is not the Western philosophical tradition in fact the legacy of the scandalous confrontation of myth with its own historicity?”

Well, sure. The purpose of most philosophers was to make their own conciousness(episteme, discourse?) ahistorical. Escape from contingency.

Posted by bob mcmanus · October 26, 2004 05:59 PM

Crap! I wrote that before my coffee. I am an idiot.

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 26, 2004 06:50 PM

Bob: It is very disorientating being agreed with! (It’s probably just as well it doesn’t happen very often.)

Posted by des von bladet · October 27, 2004 10:01 AM

Hang on, you’re celebrating his death?

Posted by P.M.Lawrence · October 30, 2004 11:13 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.