Censorship as a Typographical Chimera: John Milton and John Locke on Gestures

Mester, Béla (2010) Censorship as a Typographical Chimera: John Milton and John Locke on Gestures. SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA, 25 (2). pp. 211-219. ISSN 0352-7875

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Abstract

The aim of my paper is to show some elements in Milton’s and Locke’s political writings, depending on their attitudes to different media. Milton in his argumentation against censorship must demonstrate that all the ancient instances for censorship, usually cited in his century, can be interpreted as examples of another phenomenon. However, Milton, analysing loci of Plato’s Republic and some Scriptural topics, recognises the scope and significance of non-conceptual, non-printed, non-verbal forms of communication; he describes them as signs of childish, female or uneducated behaviours, as valueless phenomena from the point of view of political liberty incarnated in the freedom of press. John Locke’s attitude is the same. I will show a chain of ideas, similar to Milton’s one, in his Two Tracts on Government and in his Epistola de tolerantia, focusing the analyses on the concept of adiaphora (indifferent things).

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