The Matter of Cognition: Lambert's Reception of Locke

Abstract

In this paper, I show Locke’s influence on the philosophy of Johann Heinrich Lambert, and in particular on his account of scientific cognition. In Section 1, I present Lambert’s view on the insufficiency of purely formal cognitions and the consequent need for material ones, showing how he links this need to the aims of Locke’s philosophy. In Section 2, I reconstruct Lambert’s account of scientificity focusing on the two criteria of scientific cognition he provides in his Neues Organon (1764): systematicity and a priori nature of cognition. I show that Lambert admits both a stronger and a weaker sense of the a priori and that, although initially dismissing the former, he fully legitimizes it in his account of simple concepts, which he conceives as the fundamental material cognitions. In Section 3, by also considering Lambert’s Architectonic (1771) I demonstrate how Locke’s thought came to influence Lambert, which explains the twofold attitude Lambert shows towards Locke. On the one hand, Lambert follows Locke in affirming the need for material cognitions, adopting his anatomy of concepts in order to find them and providing essentially the same list of simple concepts as Locke’s Essay. On the other hand, Lambert criticizes Locke for having misunderstood simple concepts for empirical cognitions while they are a priori in the stronger sense, and for not having provided the axioms and postulates that establish the features and the possibility of combining simple concepts, thus building sciences that are completely a priori as simple concepts or which, at least, include a core that is completely a priori.