Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Interestingly, Berkeley anticipated C.S. Peirce's division of signs into indices, icons, and symbols , as he contended that one idea can suggest another "by likeness [icon], by necessary connexion [index]... or by arbitrary convention [symbol]." ( The Theory of Vision Vindicated ) (The correspondence is not exact, however, since Berkeley includes a fourth category he calls "geometrical inference".)

Kenneth Pearce ( Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World ) argues that, for Berkeley, "bodies" are linguistic constructions built up from our phenomenal experience, and that causal talk, in everyday life and in physics, is an extension of that sort of operation. But Berkeley does not therefore dismiss such talk. The reason is twofold: First of all, to model things this way is useful: it helps us "in the pursuit of happiness, which is the ultimate end and design... that sets rational agents at work" (204). But these ideas are also true , in an important sense: they reflect the underlying reality of "the regular ordering of ideas instituted by God, i.e., the linguistic or grammatical structure of the divine language of nature. Our talk about bodies aims to capture the lexicon of this language, and our talk about causes, laws, and forces aims to capture its syntax" (204).

This paper had an exciting weekend: it has been accepted for publication in Collingwood and British Idealism Studies , I presented it at the annual meeting of the Long Island Philosophical Society on Saturday, and it is now available at PhilPapers.

Here : All of the great philosophers of the present era, beginning with Descartes, made the same mistake, and it colored their account of knowledge and indeed their account of pretty much everything. By ‘great philosophers’, I mean Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant. I am prepared to throw in Hegel and Mill if people think they are great philosophers too. I called this mistake the “Bad Argument”. Here it is: We never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. All we ever perceive are the perceptual contents of our own mind. This confusion rests on jumping from the fact that Berkeley says we perceive "ideas," to concluding Berkeley believes what we perceive is "all in our heads." But here is George Pappas on Berkeley: I know of no reason to think that Berkeley is committed to holding that each idea is private in the sense described. After all, any idea immediately perceived by a finite perceiver is also immediately p...

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...

Thus we get a wholly new metaphysical position. Taking the elements of the traditional seventeenth-century cosmology and simply rearranging them, Berkeley shows that, if substance means that which exists in its own right and depends on itself alone, only one substance need be asserted to exist, namely, mind. Nature as it exists empirically for our everyday perception is the work or creature of mind; nature in Galileo's sense, the purely quantitative material world of the physicist, is an abstraction from this, it is so to speak the skeleton or armature of the nature we perceive through our senses, and create in perceiving it. To sum up: we first, by the operation of our mental powers, create the warm, living, coloured, flesh-and-blood natural world which we know in our everyday experience; we then, by the operation of abstractive thinking, remove the flesh and blood from it and are left with the skeleton. This skeleton is the ‘material world’ of the physicist. In the ...

Another excerpt from my forthcoming paper: ************************** --> David Stove, in his essay “Idealism: a Victorian Horror Story (Part One),” begins by at least granting Berkeley his historical context, as we saw Hegel also did: Berkeley is one of those philosophers who are always arguing, and he gave a number of arguments for abridging the Cartesian world-view to the exclusive benefit of its mental half.   Once he had done it, everyone could see, even if they had not seen before, that Cartesianism had begged for an idealist abridgement, and that it had got it from Berkeley. (1991: 102) But what he gives with one hand he immediately takes away with the other: “There was only one catch; but it was a rather serious one.   This was that no one could believe the world-view to which those arguments of Berkeley led.” (1991: 102) Stove is certainly correct here in so far as his depiction of Berkeley’s world-view strains credulity, as it is as follows:...

From a working paper (and a very hard-working one too, I might add): ***************************************** Bertrand Russell devotes a chapter of his History of Western Philosophy to Berkeley . After a generally accurate discussion of the role of God in Berkeley’s metaphysics, he claims: “If there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes.” (1945: 647) But this is absurd: for Berkeley, without God, there would simply be no “material” objects (or other beings to see their jerky existence, for that matter). What characterizes something for Berkeley as being a part of the physical world is that it has existence not just in a human mind, but in the mind of God: that is what gives it its solidity, its ineleuctable character. Russell goes on to discuss Berkeley’s “argument ...

I am reading an excellent introduction to British Idealism: British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed . If you are at all interested in this subject, I highly recommend this book. But I do have a minor complaint: the authors repeat the common misperception of Berkeley as having had a "radically subjective view of experience." (The book only treats Berkeley peripherally, as a forerunner of 19th and 20th-century idealism, which is what makes this a minor quibble.) I am writing a paper at present tracing the history of this error, as well as that of the repeated attempts to correct it. (Collingwood is among those who sought to rectify this mistake.) The key oversight behind this misperception, from Hegel onward, has been to ignore the role of the mind of God in Berkeley's metaphysics. I don't intend to summarize the historical work from that paper here. Instead, I offer a metaphor intended to clarify the objective nature of reality as Berkeley sees it: Berkeley...

"Here [in Galileo] the character of the mind-dependent or merely phenomenal character of secondary qualities, as taught by Locke, is already full-grown. English students of philosophy, finding this doctrine in Locke, do not always realize that it is by no means an invention of his, but had been long ago taught by Galileo as an important truth, and was in fact one of the leading principles of the whole scientific movement of the preceding two centuries; and that by the time it reaches Locke it is already somewhat out of date, and ready to collapse at the first touch of Berkeley's finger." -- R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature , p. 102

Let us explore a little further how David Stove got Berkeley so wrong. As you may recall , he summarized one of Berkeley's arguments for idealism as follows: "You cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind." But Stove had to add a step to Berkeley's argument to make it stupid: "without having them in mind." The actual argument is that you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, period. What Berkeley is noting in the passage Stove cites is that when you attempt to have trees-without-the-mind in mind, you fail . And that failure is inevitable. "Trees-without-the-mind" is a mere abstraction, and to mistake mere abstractions for things that can actually exist is what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." "Ah," the materialist-minded may say, "but what about the billions of years before conscious evolved, and th...

Is a pretty good metaphor for the metaphysics of George Berkeley. (Please remember, it is just a metaphor! So don't ask, "What programming language did God use to create the universe?" or "What platforms does the game run on?") What Berkeley did, according to Berkeley scholars like A. A. Luce , was to slice through the tangles of existing metaphysics by realizing that only two kinds of entities were necessary to explain all human experience: spirits, which are active and intelligent, and thoughts. Berkeley avoided solipsism because his world was "designed" by a master spiritual being, God, who also created all other spirits. Due to his unique role in reality, God has the power to create thoughts that none of the other spirits can avoid thinking but at their own peril. As I mentioned before, a decent metaphor for getting a handle on what Berkeley is up to is that God is the creator of a video game universe, while all the other spirits are players. ...

“Descartes, Locke, and Newton, took away the world... Berkeley restored the world. Berkeley has brought us back to the world that only exist because it shines and sounds.” – W.B. Yeats “The vulgar view of Berkeley, then as now, was of a befooled enthusiast who sought notoriety by his paradoxes.” (Turbayne 1955: 244) Bishop Berkeley is popularly held to have endorsed scepticism about the existence of an external world. We have the famous incident of Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley by kicking a rock, proving that the external world is real; similarly, over a century later, G.E. Moore held up his hand during a lecture, and declared it to be real, in order to refute idealism. But is this common impression correct? This paper will trace the long history of discussion on this question, and demonstrate that there is widespread agreement amongst Berkeley scholars that the answer is “no”: Berkeley did not reject the existence of the external world. Indeed, some pr...

An academic press in the UK has asked me to draw up a proposal for turning my paper "Was Berkeley a Subjective Idealist?" into a monograph. Now, ever since I was a kid and read that Sherlock Holmes had written a monograph entitled Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos , I have wanted to write a monograph. And since blogging is the best way to get me writing, I will try out my table of contents here. Was Berkeley a Skeptic About the External World? A History of Misinterpretation Introduction Chapter I: Writing the History of Thought: Lessons from Collingwood and Cambridge Chapter II: Berkeley's Setting: Galileo, Descartes, and Locke Chapter III: Berkeley in Context Chapter IV: Berkeley out of Context Chapter V: Getting Berkeley Right Conclusion UPDATE: I am recasting the basic tension here to make clearer what Berkeley was asserting and what he was denying. Some people identify "subjective idealism" with subjectivism or soli...

Now matter how many times it is debunked, we still get this : "It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley."

"[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

"If that be true, we may say that idealism historically contains four main propositions: (1) Plato's (value is objective -- its meaning and origin lie beyond the human knower); (2) Berkeley's (reality is mental -- there is no non-mental being); (3) Hegel's (reality is organic -- wholes have properties which their parts do not have); and (4) Lotze's (reality is personal -- only persons or selves are real). Any system is idealistic which affirms one or more of these four propositions, provided Hegel's be included. Thus it may be said that the Hegelian principle yields a minimum idealism, while a "four-point" idealism is personalistic." -- Edgar Sheffield Brightman, "The Definition of Idealism," The Journal of Philosophy , 1933

Working on my paper on Berkeley, I have come up with the following list of different meanings with which the word "idealism" has been used: • A focus on ideals as opposed to pragmatic interests. It is used this way in common speech, but also sometimes by political theorists: noble idealism. (Harrington) • The belief that in history, the ideas of agents are the true driving force: personal historical idealism. (Weber, Protestant Ethic ) • The belief that in history, ideas writ-large are the true driving force: impersonal historical idealism. (Hegel: the cunning of reason) • The notion that the world is entirely made up of thinking / experiencing entities: pan-psychism. (Peirce, Whitehead) • The idea that the structure of our reality is determined by our (human) minds: transcendental idealism. (Kant) • The notion that the physical world is, in some sense, an illusion. (Vasubandhu: Yogacara) • The belief that what we think we know about the physical world is really only...

In Berkeley's 1735 book, we find: The quantity theory of money: "22. Whether, therefore, less money swiftly circulating, be not, in effect, equivalent to more money slowly circulating? Or, whether, if the circulation be reciprocally as the quantity of coin, the nation can be a loser?" Price determination by supply and demand: "24. Whether the value or price of things be not a compounded proportion, directly as the demand, and reciprocally as the plenty" The importance of money for economic calculation: "25. Whether the terms crown, livre, pound sterling, etc., are not to be considered as exponents or denominations of such proportion? And whether gold, silver, and paper are not tickets or counters for reckoning, recording, and transferring thereof?" The falsity of mercantilism: "108. Whether, although the prepossessions about gold and silver have taken deep root, yet the example of our Colonies in America doth not make it as plain...

"Bishop Berkeley wrote some of the shrewdest essays on [economic] subjects available in his time." -- Letter to Archbishop Temple