ABSTRACT
One of the most extraordinary cases of volte face in eighteenth-century philosophy is Condillac’s reversal of his response to the Molyneux Problem. In his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), he opposed the view of Locke and Berkeley, giving a positive answer to Molyneux’s question. Then in the Treatise on Sensations (1754), he changes his mind and argues for a position very close to that of Locke and Berkeley. This chapter situates Condillac’s treatments of the Molyneux Problem in the broader philosophical context of the French reception of the Problem itself in the writings of Voltaire, La Mettrie and Diderot, as well as the doctrines of innate ideas and the association of ideas, and the exciting new empirical observations deriving from William Cheselden’s cataract operations. It then sets out Condillac’s two incompatible answers to the Molyneux Problem and offers a philosophical explanation as to why Condillac changed his mind.
