ABSTRACT
This chapter offers to explain the performance of John Locke's quite differently. It provides a key as a whole, helping to exhibit its real unity and the integral connections that obtain—for better and for worse—among Locke's discussions of people, oaks, masses of matter, and atoms. Locke's treatment of the diachronic identity of bodies goes in carefully controlled stages. It starts with atoms. Locke can hardly be said to throw any light on atomic identity. Locke evidently thinks that it entails the diachronic story that he wants to establish, that is, the truth about what distinguishes an alteration in an ongoing oak from the death of one oak and the birth of a new one. In the widest understanding of substance—that which has properties and stands in relations, in contrast to the properties that are had and the relations that bind—Locke does take people to be substances.
