NEW AND NOTABLE
Bard College Assistant Professor Kathryn Tabb receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant
Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb was awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund her book project, “Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking.”
The book explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Based on her dissertation, which focused on laying out Locke’s theory of madness as caused by the association of ideas, the book will be the first to present Locke’s theory of irrationality, and will invite other scholars to challenge how people think about Locke — and perhaps other historical figures — on key themes such as personal identity, nativism, religious toleration, freedom and enslavement, private property, and empire.
The grant will support her work over an eight-month term. Previously, Tabb was an investigator for the NEH grant project, “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017—20).
Tabb will present her account of Locke’s ethics of thinking through a series of what he would call archetypes: kinds of people who exemplify the various ways in which we can go right — and more often wrong — in the conduct of our understandings. Taken together, these archetypes will allow the reader to recognize previously unappreciated commitments in Locke’s work that ground his ethics of thinking. The book’s chapters will work together to present Locke’s ethics of thinking and show how it motivates diverse facets of his philosophy.