Maggie's Farm

BD,
This ones gonna take a while to do justice to. I want to thank you for this synapse burner on a Friday morning. Even though this is what I concentrated in in Political Science, man that was 1966-70. It's gonna take some reading and thought.
Or I could go shopping at the mall and forget I ever read the question....naw too interesting.
Thanks again BD, like dangling a Royal Wulf or Parachute Bluefly above a stream full of trout...! !

Ok..BD..here's my best short term cop-out to what looks like hours of research.

Let me begin with the conclusion reached in the TCS article.
Conclusion
The lesson would seem to be this. Those who seek to appropriate Locke's legacy today must decide which part of it they value most, for they cannot coherently have it all. One must either endorse Locke's revisionist metaphysics - his rejection of objective essences and final causes in nature, his reductionistic account of the nature of persons, and so forth - and abandon the traditional moral and religious elements of his philosophy; or, if one wants to maintain these conservative elements, one must reject the revisionist metaphysics, and return to something like the Scholastic worldview it replaced. One must be either a radical or a reactionary. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to be a Lockean.
I am not prepared in such as short time to dismiss this conclusion. Parts many be relevant, others not. But what my education teaches me is that so complex a philosophical challenge as that which we undertake today do not find a satisfactory answer in a one paragraph conclusion. We are not here contemplating alone the thoughts of John Locke but of the cumulative writings of the Enlightenment, for Locke, as brilliant as he was, did not build his ideas with those who had gone before and laid groundwork for his support of destruction or modification.

In fact the entire article posits whether liberals or conservatives can lay claim to being Lockean progeny and thus claim the moral high ground for much of our current system. The article fails to mention the works of:

• John S. Mill
• Edmund Burke
• Baron de Montesquieu
• Voltaire
• Thomas Hobbes
• J.J. Rousseau
• Rene Descartes
• Immanuel Kant

I have just this morning cursorily reviewed each of these men I have previously studied. Their thoughts are relevant to this discussion, which if incorporated would form a treatise worthy of graduate work.

But to name just a few who contributed to Lockes understanding. I do not believe despite the author, Edward Feser’s previous work’s that he composed this piece in one sitting , without copious notes and research.

Unfortunately I do not have the time, nor desire to take the time, to do justice to any critique of his conclusion other than to stated what I have stated. Complexity of this nature is usually found in one place I am familiar with E=MC squared.

Correction:

Complexity of this nature is usually found SIMPLIFIED in one place I am familiar with E=MC squared.