ALESSANDRA TSUJI

The main object of ongoing research is the relationship between medicine and politics in John Locke's works. My hypothesis is that the concepts used by the philosopher to deal with medicine in its procedural aspect, already in his medical writings from the period of his initial training at Oxford, constitute an interpretative key for the Lockean political thought of his maturity. This goes against what most interpreters of his work maintain. The main methodological tool of this investigation consists of accessing the texts to understand the "normative vocabulary" — adopting, in this way, the methodology defended by Quentin Skinner — as a resource conducive to elucidating the concepts used in the debate on political themes and also discussions undertaken by members of different medical currents, so that the researched texts can reveal to us the ideological context in which the debates took place and, with this, offer the tools for carrying out the work of analogy, prescribed by the English philosopher himself, between both areas.