Catharine Trotter Cockburn

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679 to 1749) was an English philosopher and playwright, born in London, who taught herself to write, became proficient in French and studied Latin grammar and logic as a child. After early success on the stage she turned to philosophy, and her reputation rests largely on polemical works defending John Locke and Samuel Clarke. Her chief concern was a moral epistemology that joins elements of Locke's epistemology with a moral fitness theory close to Clarke's. Her morality is best described as a broadly rationalistic natural law theory that draws strongly on Locke's concept of reflection: we find the foundations of moral rules by reflecting on human and divine nature, then judge right and wrong by the fitness or unfitness of acts to those natures.