The cartesian context of Berkeley's attack on abstraction

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (4):407–424 (2004)
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Abstract

I claim that Berkeley's main argument against abstraction comes into focus only when we see Descartes as one of its targets. Berkeley does not deploy Winkler's impossibility argument but instead argues that what is impossible is inconceivable. Since Descartes conceives of extension as a determinable, and since determinables cannot exist as such, he falls within the scope of Berkeley's argument.

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Walter Ott
University of Virginia

Citations of this work

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