John Locke and Travel Writing

Giuliana Di Biase is professor of moral philosophy at G. d’ Annunzio University, Italy, where she has been teaching Ethics and Philosophical Anthropology for 20 years. Her earlier research interests revolved around contemporary debates in normative and applied ethics in Britain. She has devoted three books and numerous articles to this subject. More recently, she has come to investigate the roots of those debates in the philosophy of John Locke.  She has published two books and thirty articles and chapters which examine Locke’s ideas on toleration, virtue, moral goodness, custom, education, equality, natural law and knowledge. She is the editor-in-chief of the Italian journal Studi lockiani. Ricerche sull’età moderna, entirely dedicated to the philosophy of John Locke. In 2022, she edited a special issue of Studi lockiani focusing on  Locke’s reading in travel literature. Her contribution to that special issue centered on the travelogues mentioned in the voluminous correspondence between Locke and Nicolas Toinard.

James Farr is professor emeritus of political science and former director of the Chicago Field Studies at Northwestern University.  He taught there for 15 years, before which he also taught at Ohio State, University of Wisconsin, and University of Minnesota. His scholarly interests in recent years have centered on the politics and philosophy of John Locke. In this connection, he has published eight articles with special attention to Locke’s views of slavery, colonialism, and travel literature, as well as his role in the revisions of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. He has published more than sixty other articles or chapters on Hobbes, Rousseau, Lieber, Marx, Dewey, Popper, social capital, the philosophy and history of social science. With different coeditors, he has also published six edited volumes, most of them with Cambridge University Press, including Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Political Science in History, and The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept.