The natural history of the understanding: locke and the rise of facultative logic in the eighteenth century

Abstract

Whatever its merits and difficulties, the concept of logic embedded in much of the ‘new philosophy’ of the early modern period was then understood to supplant contemporary views of formal logic. The notion of compiling a natural history of the understanding constituted the basis of this new concept of logic. The following paper attempts to trace this view of logic through some of the major and numerous minor texts of the period, centering on the development and influence of John Locke's understanding of the analysis of the cognitive faculties as the discipline of logic.