Isaac Watts and Catharine Trotter Cockburn on The Power to Think

My paper examines philosophical views concerning the metaphysics of the mind that were developed during the first half of the eighteenth-century in response to René Descartes’s and John Locke’s philosophies. I pay particular attention to the views that Isaac Watts (1674–1748) develops in his Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects (1733) and Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s (1679?–1749) critical response to Watt’s account of substance in her Remarks upon some Writers (1743). In Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects Watts criticizes Locke’s account of substances and builds on Cartesian views about mind and body to argue for his own preferred account of substance. Watts argues that there is no need to postulate an unknown substratum, as Locke does. Instead, Watts searches for a better explanation of what substances are. His proposal is that body is solid extension, and the mind is the power to think. I will show how Watts argues that his proposed account of substance satisfies all the constraints that an account of substance is meant to have and how he defends it against various objections. Cockburn was not satisfied by Watts’s account of substance. She believes that Watts is too quick to draw metaphysical conclusions. Cockburn draws attention to the limitations of human understanding and emphasizes that humans are ignorant about many metaphysical truths. I end by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Watts’s and Cockburn’s accounts of the metaphysics of the mind and how they each advance Cartesian and Lockean views.  

Everyone interested is heartily welcome to attend!