Claude is perhaps too nice to one. I thought, even so, that some might be interested in this conversation—including those who think that you have to believe in an immaterial soul in order to believe in an afterlife.
GS What did Richard Overton and other mortalists believe about the afterlife 2:32 PM
Claude Richard Overton (fl. 1640s) was one of the most articulate proponents of mortalism in the English-speaking world, and his views are well documented.
Overton’s Mortalism
His key work was Man’s Mortalitie (1644), in which he argued that the soul is not naturally immortal and does not survive death separately from the body. His position was a form of thnetopsychism — the view that the whole person, body and soul, dies together and awaits resurrection as a unity. He rejected the Platonic idea of an immaterial, naturally immortal soul as unscriptural and philosophically incoherent. For Overton, resurrection was not the reunion of a surviving soul with a newly raised body, but the re-creation of the whole person by God. Immortality was thus a gift of God at the resurrection, not an inherent property of the soul.
Soul Sleep vs. Total Death
Mortalism came in two main varieties:
Psychopannychism (”soul sleep”) — the soul exists but is unconscious between death and resurrection. This was associated with figures like William Tyndale and, early in his career, John Calvin (who later attacked it sharply in his Psychopannychia, 1534).
Thnetopsychism (”soul death”) — Overton’s position: the soul simply ceases to exist at death until God recreates the whole person at the Last Judgement.
Other Mortalists
The tradition was broader than Overton alone:
William Tyndale — the great Bible translator held a form of soul sleep, arguing that the dead are simply unconscious until the resurrection, and used this to critique Catholic prayers for the dead and the doctrine of purgatory.
Martin Luther — expressed soul sleep sympathies in some writings, though his position was inconsistent and he never made it a central doctrine.
Michael Servetus — the radical Spanish theologian held mortalist views as part of his broader anti-Trinitarian theology.
Thomas Hobbes — in Leviathan (1651) argued from a materialist position that the soul is not immaterial; he was evasive but his framework strongly implied mortalism.
John Milton — in De Doctrina Christiana (unpublished in his lifetime) explicitly endorsed thnetopsychism, arguing that the soul is generated from matter and dies with the body.
Leveller and radical circles — Overton’s mortalism was connected to his political radicalism; among the Levellers and some Ranters and early Quakers, mortalist ideas circulated, often linked to anticlericalism and rejection of priestly authority over the afterlife.
Why it mattered politically
Mortalism was not merely a theological curiosity — it had sharp political edges. If the soul does not survive death and face immediate divine judgement, then:
Purgatory is impossible, which undercut Catholic ecclesiastical power
Hell as a place of immediate torment is called into question, reducing clerical power to terrify the laity
The resurrection becomes wholly God’s prerogative, emphasising divine sovereignty over human fate
For radicals like Overton, it also implied a kind of spiritual egalitarianism — no priestly mediators were needed between the dead and their eventual resurrection.
The mainstream reaction
Mortalism was widely condemned. Calvin’s Psychopannychia attacked soul sleep vigorously. The doctrine was associated with Anabaptists, heretics, and political subversives, which is partly why it flourished among the radical sects of the English Civil War period but remained on the margins of orthodox Protestantism.
GS how likely is it that John Locke was also a mortalist? 2:34 PM
Claude This is a genuinely interesting question in Locke scholarship, and the evidence is substantial enough that many historians take it seriously.
The case that Locke was a mortalist
The philosopher John Yolton argued influentially in his book John Locke and the Way of Ideas and related work that Locke’s philosophy strongly inclined toward mortalism. The main evidence:
In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke raised the possibility that God might have made matter capable of thought — the famous “thinking matter” hypothesis. If the soul is not necessarily an immaterial substance, its natural immortality becomes very hard to defend. Locke refused to rule this out, which scandalised many contemporaries.
Locke was deeply interested in what the New Testament actually says about resurrection and immortality. His late work The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) emphasises that immortality is a gift granted through Christ, not a natural property of the soul — which is precisely the mortalist and conditional immortality position.
His posthumously published Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Paul shows close engagement with Pauline resurrection theology, again stressing that eternal life is conditional on Christ rather than inherent to the soul.
Locke was a close friend of Philip van Limborch and was deeply read in Socinian and Arminian theology, traditions that were hospitable to mortalist ideas.
The “thinking matter” problem
This was the crux for contemporaries. If Locke allowed that matter could think, then:
There is no need to posit an immaterial soul
Without an immaterial soul, natural immortality has no basis
Resurrection becomes the only route to any afterlife
Bishop Edward Stillingfleet attacked Locke on precisely this point, and their exchange is revealing. Locke defended his position carefully but never fully retreated. His defenders at the time and since have noted that he was deliberately agnostic rather than committed, but the agnosticism itself was radical by the standards of the day.
The historian’s consensus
The most thorough treatment is by John W. Yolton and more recently Victor Nuovo and Stephen Voss. The philosopher Nicholas Jolley and historian Justin Champion have also discussed it seriously. The broad view among specialists is:
Locke almost certainly held something close to conditional immortality — that humans are not naturally immortal, and that eternal life depends entirely on divine gift through resurrection
Whether he went all the way to full thnetopsychism (soul dies entirely at death) is less clear
He was almost certainly aware that his “thinking matter” hypothesis had mortalist implications and chose not to foreclose them
Given the dangers of openly avowing heterodoxy, his characteristic caution and strategic ambiguity make it hard to pin him down definitively
The political context
Like Overton, Locke had reasons to be careful. Mortalism was associated with radical sectaries, Socinians, and freethinkers. Locke had already lived in exile and was sensitive to accusations of heterodoxy. His friend Anthony Collins — who was more openly materialist — was probably influenced by Locke’s hints in this direction.
The bottom line
The probability is fairly high that Locke privately held something in the mortalist family of views, particularly conditional immortality grounded in resurrection rather than natural soul-immortality. The “thinking matter” passage alone makes natural immortality very difficult to reconcile with his philosophy. Whether he believed the soul literally ceases to exist at death (rather than sleeping) is harder to say. It is one of those cases where a careful thinker left himself room to deny the most radical interpretation while clearly finding it philosophically live.
GS: what does Galen Strawson think? 2:36 PM
Claude Galen Strawson has written directly and influentially on the question of whether Locke was a mortalist, and his view is quite strong.
Strawson’s Position
Strawson argued in his book Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment (2011, revised edition 2014) that Locke was indeed a mortalist — and more specifically that this is not a peripheral or speculative point but is central to understanding Locke’s account of personal identity. For Strawson, scholars have systematically misread Locke by ignoring or downplaying the mortalist implications of his thought.
Strawson’s argument runs roughly as follows:
Locke genuinely believed that the soul or thinking substance may not survive death, because he took seriously the possibility that thinking is a property of matter
Locke’s famous account of personal identity — grounding it in continuity of consciousness and memory rather than in continuity of substance — only makes full sense if you understand that Locke did not assume a naturally immortal immaterial soul carrying identity through death
The resurrection in Locke is God re-creating a person and conferring conscious identity upon them, not a naturally surviving soul being reunited with a body
Locke’s account of the judgement day is therefore one where God guarantees personal identity at resurrection, compensating for the fact that no soul naturally persists
Strawson vs. the mainstream
Strawson is characteristically combative in arguing that most Locke scholars have missed this, either through inattention or through unconsciously importing assumptions about the soul that Locke himself refused to make. He thinks the mortalist reading is not merely plausible but is clearly correct once you read Locke carefully and charitably.
Strawson’s broader philosophical interests
It is worth noting that Strawson comes to this with his own philosophical preoccupations. He is well known for his defence of panpsychism — the view that experience or consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality present even in basic matter. This makes him particularly alert to Locke’s “thinking matter” hypothesis, since Locke’s willingness to entertain that matter might think resonates with Strawson’s own commitments. Strawson sees Locke as a more radical and honest thinker than the sanitised versions presented in standard histories of philosophy.
He has also written more broadly on consciousness, the self, and the nature of experience — in works like Mental Reality and The Evident Connexion — and his reading of Locke fits into a larger project of taking seriously the philosophical possibility that materialism and a robust account of inner experience are compatible.
The bottom line
Strawson’s view is that Locke was almost certainly a mortalist, that this is the most natural reading of his texts, and that it illuminates rather than distorts his philosophy of mind and personal identity. Among Locke scholars his reading remains contested but has been taken seriously, and it has done a great deal to push the mortalism question to the centre of Locke studies.
GS You write as if there is a problem about being both a materialist and a realist about consciousness. This is understandable, given many uses use of the word ‘materialism’ in the last 150 years. But the original use of ‘materialism’ is quite different. The original claim of materialism was precisely that even consciousness was something wholly material. You didn’t need a non-material soul to have consciousness (consider, for example, Mary Calkins, Thomas Hobbes, Anne Conway in the seventeenth century—but also many others). That was why materialism was so much disliked by religious authorities.
Here is a passage from a forthcoming paper: “It’s regrettable (to say the least) that some take the word “materialism” to denote a view that doubts or even denies the existence of consciousness, for the great claim of classical philosophical materialism was always precisely the opposite. It was that consciousness—real consciousness!—was wholly material. The point of materialism was precisely that you didn’t need a non-material soul to have consciousness (consider, for example, Mary Calkins, Thomas Hobbes, Anne Conway in the seventeenth century; and many others). That was why it was so much disliked by religious authorities.
We were meant to have got over the mistake of thinking that materialism is inimical to consciousness some time in the 1920s, after an unfortunate period of about sixty years in which materialism was more or less identified with what one might call “mechanicalism”, the view (which obviously rules out the existence of consciousness) that everything that exists can be given a full explanation—explanation, not just description—in mechanistic terms. In 1922 James Bissett Pratt published a paper called “The New Materialism”—the “new” materialists being, precisely, those who agreed with the original materialists in being outright realists about consciousness! It was, however, already clear to Morton Prince in the 1870s (see e.g. Prince 1885) that materialism shouldn’t be associated with, let alone identified with, mechanicalism, since its standout claim was and is (once again) precisely that consciousness—real consciousness!—is wholly material This is an appalling mess, right at the heart of philosophy.” What do you think of this?
Claude This is a compelling and important corrective, and I think it is largely right. Let me engage with it seriously.
What the passage gets right
The historical point is well taken. Classical materialists — Hobbes being the paradigm case — were not denying consciousness; they were making the audacious claim that consciousness itself is part of the natural, material world. The scandal of materialism for religious authorities was precisely that it made the soul unnecessary, not that it made mind unnecessary. A view that simply denied consciousness would have been philosophically bizarre and would not have threatened anyone’s theology in the relevant way.
The Anne Conway example is particularly interesting, though slightly complicated — she ended up a Vitalist Quaker whose metaphysics gave everything a degree of spirit, which might be better described as a kind of panpsychism than materialism in any straightforward sense. But the broader point stands: seventeenth-century thinkers exploring the natural basis of mind were not eliminativists.
The diagnosis of what went wrong is also persuasive. The identification of materialism with mechanicalism — the view that a complete causal-explanatory account of the world can be given in purely mechanical terms — is indeed a different and much more restrictive claim. Mechanism rules out consciousness almost by definition, since conscious experience does not appear in mechanical descriptions. Conflating materialism with mechanism produced the apparently paradoxical situation where “materialism” seemed to require denying or downgrading the reality of the most certain thing we know — our own experience.
The Pratt observation
The point about Pratt’s 1922 paper is historically useful. It shows that the confusion was already recognised and named a century ago, and yet the terminological mess persisted and arguably deepened through the twentieth century, particularly as behaviourism, functionalism, and various eliminativist programmes came to dominate philosophy of mind. Each of these was in some sense “materialist” in the debased sense while being deeply hostile to or suspicious of phenomenal consciousness as a serious explanandum.
One complication worth raising
The passage is right that original materialism affirmed consciousness as real and material. But there is a genuine philosophical question — not a terminological one — lurking here, which is how consciousness is material. Hobbes’s answer was fairly crude. The hard problem, as Chalmers formulated it, is not dissolved simply by insisting that consciousness is real and material; it asks why and how any physical process gives rise to subjective experience at all.
The passage might be read as implying that acknowledging consciousness as real and material is itself sufficient to resolve or dissolve the difficulty. But one could argue that the reason the mechanicalist identification became tempting was precisely because no one had a satisfying account of how experience fits into the material world — and that absence of explanation created pressure toward either eliminativism or dualism.
Strawson’s own panpsychism is in some ways an attempt to honour both the original materialist commitment and the reality of consciousness, by arguing that experience must be a fundamental feature of matter itself. That is a coherent position, but it arguably revises our conception of matter quite substantially — which raises the question of whether “materialism” is still quite the right word.
The broader point
The terminological mess the passage describes has done real damage to philosophy of mind. It has allowed eliminativists to claim the mantle of scientific respectability under the label “materialist” while dismissing consciousness as an illusion or an explanandum to be explained away — which would have struck Hobbes or Priestley as simply confused. Reclaiming the original meaning, as the passage urges, would at minimum clarify what the actual disputes are. Whether consciousness is real is not the question; how it is material is.
So the diagnosis seems right, the historical evidence supports it, and the frustration is entirely warranted.
GS you don’t seem to be aware that panpsychism, classically understood, is a form of materialism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, panpsychism is “the theory or belief that there is an element of consciousness in all matter”! 2:47 PM
Claude: You are absolutely right, and that is an important correction.
If panpsychism is precisely the view that consciousness is a feature of matter as such, then it is not a departure from materialism or a revision of it — it is a form of materialism, and arguably the most consistent form, given the original materialist commitment to the reality of consciousness. Strawson’s panpsychism is not a retreat from materialism toward something else; it is materialism taking its own foundational claim seriously.
I also implicitly suggested that panpsychism “revises our conception of matter substantially” — as though the conception of matter as inert, unconscious mechanism were the default or canonical one that panpsychism has to answer to. But that gets things backwards. It is the mechanicalist conception of matter as intrinsically mindless that is the revisionary and philosophically contentious one. If consciousness is real and material, and if matter is what is real, then matter was always going to turn out to be the kind of thing that can be or involve consciousness. Panpsychism follows fairly naturally from taking both premises seriously.
The irony you are pointing to is then quite deep. The philosophers who call themselves materialists while dismissing or eliminating consciousness have drifted furthest from the original materialist position. Whereas someone like Strawson, often treated as heterodox or as departing from materialism into something exotic, is in a meaningful sense closer to what materialism always meant.
I should have seen that, rather than suggesting panpsychism strains the concept of materialism.
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