Berkeley: The Evidence Just Keeps Piling Up

By -
"[Berkeley] is no subjective idealist; he does not say or hold that my smelling is the smell or makes it; for him, the smell is the smell and the sound is the sound; but the existence of smell and sound are, he insists, nothing other than the smell smelt and the sound heard." -- A.A. Luce, Berkeley's Immaterialism, p. 65

Comments

  1. Gabe Ruth9:02 AM

    Have you read Lewis' The Great Divorce? One of the interesting things about it is how he deals with the difficulty of communicating that ultimate reality is realer, more substantial, than our current existence. For the shades in Purgatory, when they go to the border lands to meet their guides, it hurts their feet to walk on the grass, and the guides are hard to look at.

    I wonder if this is Berkley's whole purpose, to get people out of the mental habit of thinking that our souls are wispy, ghostlike things, less substantial than a car or the smell of coffee. But instead of saying the spiritual world is more substantial, he tells us it is the physical world that is wispy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:56 AM

      I donàt think so, Gabe: he says the physical world is just what it appears to be: these concrete sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.

      By the way, Lewis was a big Berkeley fan: it was Berkeley who rid him of materialism.

      Delete

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