ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how John Locke’s naturalistic view of the human mind is related to other aspects of his position, such as his mind-body nominalism and epistemic humility. It explores how Locke’s naturalistic view of the human mind is related to other aspects of his position, such as his mind-body nominalism and epistemic humility and three thinkers who responded to Locke’s Essay in their major works. Two of them, Richard Burthogge and William Carroll, are relatively lesser-known contemporaries of Locke’s, and the third is the contemporary philosopher Colin McGinn. Jonathan Bennett’s account of a ‘trans-attribute’ essence is an excellent illustration of the Lockean unknown support for the different types of qualities. A more modern form of this Lockean Spinozism can be found in Colin McGinn’s approach to the mind-body problem. In Burthogge’s words, Lockean complex ideas are ‘things as they are in the mind’ after having ‘undergo[ne] an Abstraction and sublimation’
