Berkeley Knew There Was a World Out There, Continued

By -
I don't know if I have a single reader who finds this topic interesting, but, as I have mentioned before, for me this blog is a writer's journal that happens to have readers. And it happens I'm writing a paper entitled "Was Berkeley a Subjective Idealist?" (Spoiler: No, he wasn't!)

In one of his lesser know works, Alciphron, I found this beautiful quote backing me today:

The soul of man actuates but a small body, an insignificant particle, in respect of the great masses of nature, the elements and heavenly bodies, and system of the world. And the wisdom that appears in those motions, which are the effects of human reason, is incomparably less than that which discovers itself in the structure and use of organized natural bodies, animal or vegetable. -- Philosophical Writings, p. 274
Does those look like the words of a man who thought the world was all in his head?

Comments

  1. PH8:12 PM

    So far all I've read by Berkeley is "The Analyst." It's well worth a read for anyone interested in the history of calculus. The line about the "ghosts of departed quantities" is everyone's favorite snippet, but the whole thing is pretty well-written.

    ReplyDelete
  2. kevin quinn1:21 PM

    Well I guess I have to consign to the dustbin the ditty that goes:

    Bishop Berkeley
    Whispers darkly,
    "If I don't see you,
    You don't be you."

    And of course we have Johnson's refutation: (Kicking Stone: "I refute him thus.")as reported by Boswell. That's out, too. Damn. (;

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah7:38 AM

    Kevin, see this post re Johnson.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more