ABSTRACT
Locke denies that syllogism is the proper instrument of reason, and that disputation is a sure way — or even a useful way — of unearthing or expounding truth. A mind cluttered with moods and figures is no better off, he thinks, and probably a good deal worse off, than a mind trained to exercise, directly, the ‘native Faculty’ on which the perception of validity in any case depends (Essay IV. xvii. 4). In this essay I examine the implications of these views for education in logic — for the writing of textbooks, for the design of university curricula, and for the habits of thought those already ‘educated’ should stamp out or encourage. It may look at first as if Lockean logic cannot be taught, that a Lockean education in reasoning must be one of benign neglect: leave our faculties alone, Locke seems to say, and they will not mislead us. But Locke's interest in education was intense, and his confidence in its ameliorative power was enormous. He resisted Molyneux's plea that he turn the Essay into a logic ‘accommodated to the usual Forms’, and to the prevailing curriculum of universities in England, Ireland, and Scotland, but he did compose a different kind of logic, ‘formless’ by traditional standards, whose rules and precepts are more challenging — and more useful — than the rules in the textbooks it sought to replace. In the eighteenth century the task urged on Locke by Molyneux was taken up by university teachers and popular pedagogues: Isaac Watts, Edward Bentham, William Duncan, and Thomas Reid. Each sought to combine a more or less extreme version of Cartesian or Lockean intuitionism with the formalism of the tradition. The teaching of Lockean logic was, in ways I hope to clarify, a distinctively ‘ethical’ enterprise, one that resembled ancient portraits of the teaching of moral virtue. The textbooks Locke used as a student at Oxford demanded more exactness than their subject permitted (a tendency Aristotle warns against at Nicomachean Ethics 1094b12ff); the result was a disastrous narrowing of the subject's scope. 1 The teaching of logic raised, for Locke and the eighteenth-century writers who followed in his wake, some of the same questions raised for the ancients by the teaching of virtue. ‘Is virtue something that can be taught?’ Meno asks Socrates (Meno 70a). ‘Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?’ Locke believes that reasoners can be educated only through practice, and that its success depends on a native faculty of insight whose standards are shaped by a community.
