David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments `admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no existence apart from the spirits who transmit and receive (...) it. Kenneth P. Winkler presents these conclusions as natural consequences of Berkeley's reflections on such topics as representation, abstraction, necessary truth, and cause and effect. In the closing chapters Proefssor Winkler offers new interpretations of Berkeley's view on unperceived objects, corpuscularian science, and our knowledge of God and other minds. (shrink)

Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, first published in 1690, is probably the most ambitious contribution to early modern metaphysics by a woman writing in the English language. This beautifully prepared edition makes Conway’s treatise available to twentieth-century readers in an accessible English translation of the 1690 Latin text—itself a translation of an original English manuscript that has long been lost.

Even philosophers who believe there is a single “problem of personal identity” conceive of that problem in different ways. They differ not only in their ways of stating the problem, but in the parts of philosophy to which they assign it, and in the resources they feel entitled to call upon in their attempts to deal with it. My topic in this paper is an eighteenth-century uncertainty about the place within philosophy of the problem of personal identity. Is it a (...) problem in metaphysics, or a problem in ethics? Here I try to show that the boundary between ethics and metaphysics was—for a line of philosophers beginning with Locke, continuing with Shaftesbury, and ending with Hume—a shifting and sometimes disputed one. I hope what I have to say will help to clarify a longstanding problem in the interpretation of Hume: his motive for repudiating, in the Appendix to the Treatise, the account of judgments of personal identity and simplicity he had provided in Book I. (shrink)

Includes generous selections from the Essay, topically arranged passages from the replies to Stillingfleet, a chronology, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index based on the entries that Locke himself devised.

I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s creative appropriation of a philosophical doctrine that helps to make sense of an attitude towards life, its gifts and its burdens, that is often expressed in Puritan diaries. The doctrine, now known as the doctrine of continuous creation, holds that in conserving the world, God re-creates it at every moment, making the same creative effort at each ever-advancing now that God made at the very beginning. Continuous creation was explicitly endorsed by at least one Puritan (...) diarist, Jonathan Edwards, and it helps to explain the intense self-inspection and valiant response to life to which other Puritan diarists (including Emerson's aunt, Mary Moody Emerson) testify. Continuous creation was an important ingredient in the idealism of Edwards and, once translated, it became an important ingredient in the idealism of Emerson. My primary aim to describe Emerson’s creative translation of the doctrine as Edwards understood it, but I also discuss Emerson's relation to the Puritan diary, considered as a literary form. I close by suggesting that for us, a version of the doctrine of continuous creation can perhaps be a source of optimism and an incentive to action, as I believe it was for Emerson. I also comment briefly on Emerson's grateful reliance on text-to-text translations. When Emerson studied translations of sacred texts from around the world, what he heard was not difference and dissent, but agreement: agreement on the very points that united him with Edwards, different as they were in other ways. (shrink)

There are three propositions that this author demonstrates in his argument: the contention that berkeley 's attack on abstract ideas is not made wholly compatible with his atomic sensationalism, that berkeley does not provide or employ a single definition or criterion for determining the limit of abstraction and that the doctrine of abstract ideas furnishes no real support to berkeley 's argument against the existence of material substance independent of perception.

Locke is what present-day aestheticians, critics, and historians call an intentionalist. He believes that when we interpret speech and writing, we aim—in large part and perhaps even for the most part—to recover the intentions, or intended meanings, of the speaker or writer. Berkeley and Hume shared Locke’s commitment to intentionalism, but it is a theme that recent philosophical interpreters of all three writers have left largely unexplored. In this paper I discuss the bearing of intentionalism on more familiar themes in (...) empiricist reflections on language, among them the signification of things (as opposed to ideas); the signifying role of whole propositions; and the possibility of reference to an “external” world. (shrink)

Genesis suggests that God is the creator of kinds. Kinds as Locke understands them are what are nowadays called "social constructions". They are social constructions because the boundaries between them reflect our interests, perspectives, and desires, but in Locke's view those boundaries are not altogether arbitrary, because they also reflect natural or God‐given similarities among things. This chapter looks more closely at the story of creation, and explains how, in John Locke's view, kinds in particular, those kinds whose members Locke (...) calls "substances", come to be. It further comments on the simplicity and explanatory strength of Locke's story. In spite of its strengths, Locke's view is open to many objections and attended by many complications, one of which is considered here. One objection is that the story of creation pays only glancing attention to entities that must exist in order for the story to be true. (shrink)

Kenneth Winkler's esteemed edition of Berkeley's _Principles_ is based on the second edition, the last one published in Berkeley's lifetime. Life other members of Hackett's philosophical classics series, it features editorial elements found to be of particular value to students and their teachers: analytical table of contents; chronology of the author's life; selected bibliography; note on the text; glossary; and index.

Most of our histories of philosophy, in our books and especially in our courses, are what William James called “appreciative chronicle[s] of human master-strokes”. They resemble tours of grand and isolated monuments. Sarah Hutton’s magnificent British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century is a different kind of history, in which masterpieces are placed in conversation with books that are now neglected or all but forgotten. By means of this “conversation model,” Hutton provides what she justly terms “a ‘thick description’ of seventeenth-century (...) culture, setting marginal and ‘major’ thinkers within [an]… integrated account of... (shrink)

This paper relates the work of the great British empiricists – Locke, Berkeley, and Hume – to issues of multiculturalism. It is argued that these philosophers can help to provide us with some of the tools we need to craft an appropriate response to the diversity of cultures.

I clarify Locke’s intentionalism and explain what we might gain by paying more attention to the role of linguistic intentions in the work of the British empiricists.

Emerson said that idealism sees the world in God: not as “painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in a aged creeping Past,” but as “a vast picture” painted by God “on the instant eternity.” Emerson’s portrait fits A.C. Grayling’s Berkeley, who sees the world in an infinite spirit whose power is unfailing and ubiquitous. Berkeley’s arguments, Grayling suggests, move at three levels, and at the metaphysical level, God’s activity accounts for what occurs at the level of sensory experience (...) and at “the level of ordinary thought and talk about everyday experience and its objects”. Level 3 explanations invoking matter, violate Berkeley’s “austere constraints” on “sensefulness”. Grayling himself accepts these constraints. This permits him to conclude that although Berkeley cannot establish the God his level 3 accout requires, his claim that the esse of sensible things is percipi is “substantially defensible”. (shrink)

Emerson said that idealism sees the world in God: not as “painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in a aged creeping Past,” but as “a vast picture” painted by God “on the instant eternity.” Emerson’s portrait fits A.C. Grayling’s Berkeley, who sees the world in an infinite spirit whose power is unfailing and ubiquitous. Berkeley’s arguments, Grayling suggests, move at three levels, and at the metaphysical level, God’s activity accounts for what occurs at the level of sensory experience (...) and at “the level of ordinary thought and talk about everyday experience and its objects”. Level 3 explanations invoking matter, violate Berkeley’s “austere constraints” on “sensefulness”. Grayling himself accepts these constraints. This permits him to conclude that although Berkeley cannot establish the God his level 3 accout requires, his claim that the esse of sensible things is percipi is “substantially defensible”. (shrink)

For decades scholars thought they knew Hume's position on the existence of causes and objects he was a sceptic. However, this received view has been thrown into question by the `new readings of Hume as a sceptical realist. For philosophers, students of philosophy and others interested in theories of causation and their history, The New Hume Debate is the first book to fully document the most influential contemporary readings of Hume's work. Throughout, the volume brings the debate beyond textual issues (...) in Hume to contemporary philosophical issues concerning causation and knowledge of the external world and issues in the history of philosophy, offering the reader a model for scholarly debate. This revised paperback edition includes three new chapters by Janet Broughton, Peter Kail and Peter Millican. Contributors: Kenneth A. Richman, Barry Stroud, Galen Strawson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John P. Wright, Simon Blackburn, Edward Craig, Martin Bell, Daniel Flage, Anne Jaap Jacobson, Rupert Read, Janet Broughton, Peter Millican, Peter Kail. (shrink)

These are my comments on Ken Winkler's account of Locke's philosophy of language.

Throughout its history, the relationship between government and science in the United States has been mutually beneficial but also contentious. This article reviews the recent history of this relationship and attributes the conflict to different norms and values in each of the institutions. A policy culture is the result. It sets the limits of government action and shapes the policy agenda, the debates, and their outcomes. The evolving norms of policy culture are examined on the basis of two specific controversies: (...) pork-barrel support of science and university-industry relations. The article concludes with a discussion of why the study of a policy culture helps us understand the ways in which values shape science policy. (shrink)

Elementary education students enrolled in both science methods and social studies methods coursework implemented standards-based STS lessons during their clinical experience. Data were collected from preservice teachers, elementary/middle school students, and cooperating in-service teachers. Findings from each school group include (a) preservice teachers' content knowledge in science and social studies hindered their development of meaningful STS curriculum, (b) the STS curriculum development and implementation experience increased preservice teachers' anxieties, (c) interviews with elementary students after the STS learning suggest that they (...) did achieve some understanding of science and social studies, and (d) cooperating in-service teachers' conceptualization of curriculum differed from the science and social studies professors' understanding. (shrink)