ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes John Locke’s ontologies of person and property, which has constituted the philosophical foundation of modern Western society. This chapter demonstrates that Locke’s concept of property ontologically restores the Roman legal concept of dominium, which was created in the late ancient Roman Republic. According to Friedrich Nietzsche and Alfred North Whitehead, modern Western ontology mistakenly assumes that reality has the same structure as the linguistic structure of subject-predicate. The chapter identifies that Locke’s ontology of person-property makes the same mistake, and by identifying this mistake in Locke’s ontology of property, this chapter advances an ontological critique that sheds new light on the understanding of the modern concept of property.
