LOGIC139another plane of existence or creation,
or they will be re-created at a future res-
urrection, or that their souls will persist
in the lives of other humans or nonhu-
man animals. The belief in life after death
is an ancient concept. Pythagoras, for
example, believed in the transmigration
of souls whereby a human being could
one day be reincarnated as a dog. See
IMMORTALITY.
LIFE, MEANING OF. Questions about
the meaning of life generally concern the
value and purpose of human life, but one
can ask about the meaning of not just life,
but also about the meaning of the cosmos.
Possible answers include: human life is
intrinsically valuable if led ethically and
to maturity; human life is both intrinsi-
cally valuable and yet it is also part of
a large (boundless?) created order sus-
tained by a God of love; or “man [human
being] is a useless passion,” which is the
last line of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Buddhist accounts of life’s meaning differ
from Muslim accounts, and so on.
LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704). A surgeon
and important contributor to metaphys-
ics, epistemology, and political theory.
Locke was one of the first British empiri-
cists who gave pride of place to the
authority of observation, discounting the
appeal to innate ideas. He was a theist and
defended a consciousness-based account
of personal identity. What makes you the
same person over time is the fact
that your consciousness is continuous
between now and your past. He believed
that people own themselves and their
labor, and he defended the idea that prop-
erty is an extension of self-ownership
and labor. Often accused of promoting
an excessive personal individualism, he
nonetheless held that persons are respon-
sible for the needy and dispossessed.
He defended Jesus as the Messiah and
Christian faith as a whole, although he
may have denied that God is triune. Locke
was an opponent of the divine right of
kings and he promoted religious toler-
ance except in the case of Roman Catho-
lics, whom he believed to be servants of
a foreign prince. His works include Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1689),
Two Treatises of Government (1689—
published anonymously), Letter on Toler-
ation (1689—published anonymously),
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(1693), and The Reasonableness of Chris-
tianity (1695).LOGIC. Formally, “logic” refers to rules
of entailment such as the law of identity
(A is A), noncontradiction (A is not not
A), and excluded middle (either A or not
A). Informally, one may refer to the logic
of a given position in the case of inquiry
about some practice or belief system. The
“logic” behind the debate over whether a
war is justified, for example, may include
the different conditions outlined in the
just war tradition.