Although excluded from the standard account of the history of philosophy, Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749) avoided the 17th-century bias against female intellectual skills and was an active contributor to the early modern philosophical discourse. In her Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay (1702), she defended Locke from several criticisms by Thomas Burnet (1635-1715). By analysing three of Burnet’s main arguments, such as the theory of natural conscience, his anti-voluntarism, and his belief in the immateriality of the soul, Trotter showed that he often misinterpreted John Locke’s principles, especially those concerning his moral epistemology. Moreover, beyond her apologetic aim, she also presented her own moral philosophy, arguing that the true ground of morality is the rational and social nature of human beings. Although Trotter was clearly inspired by John Locke, her Defence was not simply a vindication, and she was not his mere handmaiden, for her thought was original and independent in many respects.

John Locke accepts that every perception gives me immediate and intuitive knowledge of my own existence. However, this knowledge is limited to the present moment when I have the perception. If I want to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions of my continued existence over time, Locke argues that it is important to clarify what ‘I’ refers to. While we often do not distinguish the concept of a person from that of a human being in ordinary language, Locke emphasizes that this distinction is important if we want to engage with questions of identity over time. According to Locke, persons are thinking intelligent beings who can consider themselves as extended into the past and future and who are concerned for their happiness and accountable for their actions. Moreover, for Locke a self is a person, considered from a first-personal point of view. I show that the concept of self that he develops in the context of his discussion of persons and personal identity is richer and more complex than the I-concept that he invokes in his version of the cogito. I further argue that Locke’s moral and religious views explain why he emphasizes the need for a conceptual distinction between persons and human beings. In the final section I turn to the reception of Locke’s view by some of his early critics and defenders, including Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, an anonymous author, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn.

Locke famously claims that we can have demonstrative knowledge of morality. Ever since the publication of Locke’s Essay, though, critics such as Thomas Burnet have claimed that Locke’s moral theory, and other views, make certainty about morality impossible. For Locke holds a natural law theory of morality according to which God’s commands make an action morally good or bad, and God must enforce those commands with divine sanctions in an afterlife. Burnet objects, first, that if God’s commands were arbitrary, there would be no way for us to determine what it is that God has commanded us to do without the help of revelation. Second, he argues that because Locke is agnostic about the immateriality of the soul, on Locke’s view we cannot be certain that there are divine sanctions in an afterlife. For these reasons Burnet concludes that, according to Locke’s own commitments, we cannot know that a particular action is morally good or bad. In this paper, I argue that, on Locke’s view, morality depends on God’s non-arbitrary will, which is discoverable by reason, and that Locke thinks he can demonstratively prove there will be an afterlife. Moreover, Catherine Trotter Cockburn gave a similar reply to Burnet in 1702. So, contrary to what Burnet and others have thought, I follow Cockburn in claiming that Locke can consistently claim that we can have demonstrative knowledge of morality.

Although she has been not included in the standard account of the history of philosophy, Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an active contributor to the early modern philosophical discourse, especially regarding morality.. Her philosophical production was primarily in defence of John Locke and Samuel Clarke. Nevertheless, her thought was original and independent in many respects. Cockburn’s moral philosophy combines elements of Locke's epistemology with Clarke’s fitness theory, and its central axiom is that the true ground of morality consists in human nature. She argued that, since all human beings are naturally provided with reason, moral obligation rests on the conformity of God’s command to our own reason. According to her anti-voluntarist moral view, the will of God does not lay the foundations of morality, but it only gives morality the force of a law. Furthermore, Cockburn maintained that Man is naturally inclined towards sociability and, consequently, morally obliged to contribute to the good and preservation of society. This is one of the most distinctive of Cockburn’s ideas, which departs from a strictly Lockean moral view. Cockburn entertained a universal and anti-dogmatic idea of the Christian religion, founded on the essentials of human nature, i.e. reason and sociability. In her view, since there is not an absolutely perfect communion, everyone can choose the one she/he judges as the best. Churches should not waste time presuming to be infallible; rather, they should aim at satisfying their adherents, by teaching those truths necessary for salvation. Thus, she converted to the Church of England from Catholicism. Although mainly focused on morality, Cockburn also dealt with some metaphysical issues that often connected to it: particularly, the nature of the soul and the reality of space. Regarding the former, she inquired whether the soul is material or spiritual, concluding that, although it is probably immaterial, there is no evidence against its immateriality or the possibility of thinking matter. Moreover, while she defended Locke’s position that only consciousness makes personal identity, Cockburn also gave an original mode-based interpretation of Locke’s view on personhood. As regards the reality of space, she rejected Edmund Law’s position against Clarke that space is only an abstract idea. On the contrary, she argued that space is a real being, which can fill up the abyss between body and spirit, since it partakes of the nature of both.

In this thesis, I defend Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy from the accusation that her simultaneous embrace of rationalism and empiricism commits her to certain logical inconsistencies. Those who accuse Cockburn of inconsistency have failed to identify the components of her theory that they find objectionable. The accusations are not completely unfounded because Cockburn does inherit certain ambiguities from John Locke. In order to repudiate the accusations, I identify tensions in Cockburn’s work that a critic might claim automatically commit her to certain logical inconsistencies. While some of the ambiguities remain unresolved, I show that Cockburn combines elements of rationalism and empiricism to form a coherent theory. She corrects elements of Locke that would otherwise be incompatible with her rationalism, meaning she is not a simple mouthpiece for his philosophy. The goal of this thesis is to lay to rest the unjustified accusations of inconsistency against Cockburn so that present-day readers can judge her work with fresh eyes.

La vicenda intellettuale di Catharine Trotter Cockburn fu per molti aspetti straordinaria. Precoce poetessa e feconda drammaturga, fu molto apprezzata dai suoi contemporanei e i suoi lavori furono ripetutamente messi in scena tra la fine del XVII e l’inizio del XVIII secolo. Ella era, inoltre, dotata di vivacità speculativa non comune e di forte determinazione, qualità che le consentirono di travalicare i ristretti confini intellettuali imposti alle donne, in età moderna, dal loro ruolo sociale. Così, Trotter ebbe il merito di inserirsi nel dibattito filosofico del tempo, scrivendo e pubblicando alcune pregevoli opere filosofiche, la prima delle quali fu A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. Uscita anonima nel 1702, a Londra, l’opera prendeva le mosse da alcune critiche rivolte al Saggio di Locke dal teologo anglicano Thomas Burnet, edite anonime tra il 1697 e il 1699 in tre serie di Remarks. Pur seguendo il ritmo dei rilievi critici di Burnet in materia di morale, religione rivelata e immortalità dell’anima, tuttavia, l’argomentazione di Trotter si smarca dall’intento meramente apologetico, rivelando interessanti tratti di originalità. Soprattutto nell’orizzonte morale la sua riflessione assume i connotati di un vero e proprio razionalismo etico, in cui l’essere umano ritrova in se stesso il fondamento dell’obbligo morale, in quanto creatura naturalmente ragionevole e sociale.