Lacking Causes Privative Causality from Locke and Kant to Lacan and Deacon

From Alexandre Koyré in the middle of the twentieth century to Quentin Meillassoux today, much of French epistemol-ogy and philosophy of science has relied upon a one-sided neo-rationalist appropriation of the Galilean distinction between primary and secondary qualities1 (a neo-rationalism indefensibly ignoring Baconian empiricism, with the latter’s emphasis on methodical observation and experimentation as essential to scientificity in the modern sense). The very phrasing of this distinction legible in Galileo Galilei’s 1623 text “The Assayer” is to be found in another canonical work of the early modern period: British empiricist John Locke’s hulking 1690 tome An Essay Concerning Human Understand-ing. Locke takes up the matter of primary and secondary qualities in “Chapter Eight” (“Some Further Considerations Concerning Our Simple Ideas of Sensation”) of “Book Two” (“Of Ideas”).