Kant on Berkeley

Here are three quotes from Berkeley's Dialogues:

"Let me be represented as one who trusts his senses, who thinks he knows the things he sees and feels, and entertains no doubts of their existence…"

"I do therefore assert that I am a certain as of my own being that there are bodies or corporeal substances..."

"I might as well doubt of my own being as of the being of those things I actually see and feel."

And what does Kant have to say about a thinker who repeatedly asserts things like the above?

"The dictum of all genuine idealists, from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in the formula: 'All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion...'"(Prolegemona to Any Future Metaphysics, 2001: 107, emphasis mine).

"experience, according to Berkeley, can have no criteria of truth because its appearances (according to him) have nothing a priori at their foundation, whence it follows that experience is nothing but sheer illusion…" (Prolegemona to Any Future Metaphysics, 2001: 108, emphasis mine).

It is hard to see how any description of Berkeley’s views could be further from Berkeley’s views than is Kant’s. And it is clear why anyone who knows Berkeley only through Kant knows him wrongly. But what is the cause of this vast gulf between what Berkeley wrote and what Kant wrote about what Berkeley wrote? Some have concluded that Kant was almost completely unfamiliar with Berkeley’s works and was relying on hearsay.

In an intriguing alternate hypothesis, Colin Turbayne contends that Kant actually knew Berkeley well, and was anxious to create separation between his views and Berkeley's, given that critcisms of Berkeley such as Johnson kicking the rock were in the air. So he set up a strawman Berkeley so he could kick him around for a bit, and show how different his philosophy was. As Turbayne says:

This brings us to the question of Kant's promise, in the first edition of the Critique, to deal with Berkeley's doctrine, and his failure to do so. In the fourth Paralogism, Kant's position is made to resemble Berkeley's more closely than anywhere else. We now know that there is, not only resemblance, but Kant's awareness of it. If he had sought to refute Berkeley in the next section, he must have ended in hopeless confusion, for he would have been refuting himself. He therefore did not even try. A niggardly description of Berkeley's doctrine was his only recourse. (Turbayne, Colin M. 1955. “Kant’s Refutation of Dogmatic Idealism.” The Philosophical Quarterly 5 (20) (July 1): 225–244. doi:10.2307/2957436.)