Berkeley: Philosophy of Mind, Misc

We argue that prevailing definitions of Berkeley’s idealism fail to rule out a nearby Spinozist rival view that we call ‘mind-body identity panpsychism.’ Since Berkeley certainly does not agree with Spinoza on this issue, we call for more care in defining Berkeley’s view. After we propose our own definition of Berkeley’s idealism, we survey two Berkeleyan strategies to block the mind-body identity panpsychist and establish his idealism. We argue that Berkeley should follow Leibniz and further develop his account of the (...) mind’s unity. Unity—not activity—is the best way for Berkeley to establish his view at the expense of his panpsychist competitors. (shrink)

Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’, Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being... entirely distinct’ from its ideas. Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent beings’ that must be supported (...) by a mental substance. There is no doubt that Berkeley’s conception of the relationship between minds and ideas is non-traditional, but that fact does not undercut his commitment to the traditional conception of substance. A robust literature has grown up around the thorny issue of reconciling Berkeley’s endorsement of mental substance with his rejection of its material counterpart. (shrink)

As central as the notion of mind is for Berkeley, it is not surprising that what he means by mind stirs debate. At issue are questions about not only what kind of thing a mind is but also how we can know it. This convergence of ontological and epistemological interests in discussing mind has led some commentators to argue that Berkeley's appeal to the Cartesian vocabulary of 'spiritual substance' signals his appropriation of elements of Descartes's theory of mind. But in (...) his account of spiritual substance, Berkeley focuses much more than Descartes on the intrinsic relation between mind and its ideas and less on the nature of mind as such. This makes it difficult to justify the claim that mind is... (shrink)

Berkeley didn’t write very much about his ‘philosophy of mind’ and what he did write is rather perplexing and perhaps inconsistent. The most basic problem is that it just isn’t clear what a mind is for Berkeley. Unsurprisingly, many interpretations tend to understand Berkeleian spirit in models provided by other philosophers – interpretations in which Berkeleian spirit turns out to be a close cousin of the Cartesian ego, Lockean spiritual substratum, Lockean self, and Humean bundle of perceptions. Stephen H. Daniel (...) and I have each offered different interpretations of Berkeley that refuse to reduce Berkeley’s account of spirit to that of other canonical thinkers and, indeed, which place Berkeleian spirit in some tension with the Aristotelian‐Cartesian‐Lockean traditions. In this paper, I argue that Daniel’s account is too extreme in that it implausibly removes Berkeley from this tradition altogether. I show how my account avoids that extreme and I defend it against some objections. (shrink)

Behind Berkeley looms the figure of Descartes. For though Descartes did not directly influence Berkeley as much as did Locke, Malebranche, and Bayle, the points at which these three most affected Berkeley’s thinking were often just those at which they were themselves reacting to Descartes’ doctrines. This is most apparent in the question of the existence of the material world, for it was Descartes who had made that a central topic of discussion in the seventeenth century. When Malebranche sought to (...) show that we cannot be certain matter exists, it was Descartes’ proof he had to combat. When Bayle used Zeno’s paradoxes to try to prove that extension cannot exist, it was Descartes’ concept of matter he was chiefly aiming at. When Locke argued for a degree of cognition “going beyond bare probability, and yet not reaching perfectly to either [intuitive or demonstrative] certainty,” it was because, while he agreed with Malebranche that Descartes did not and could not demonstrate the existence of bodies, he hoped for better evidence of it than just the high probability proffered by Malebranche. The origin and growth of Berkeley’s immaterialism owed enough to these reactions to the Cartesian proof of the material world that I think it safe to say that, without Descartes, the philosophy of Berkeley, had there been such, would be very unlike the one we know. But I have elsewhere examined the relation of Cartesianism to the denial of material substance and am not going to say more of it here. Instead, I want to look at the relation between Descartes’ and Berkeley’s concepts of mental substance, for there their agreement is almost as complete as is their disagreement about material substance. (shrink)

A plausible reading of Berkeley’s view of voluntary motion is occasionalism; this, however, leads to a specious conclusion against his argument of human action. Differing from an unqualified occasionalist reading, I consider the alternative reading that Berkeley is a conservationist regarding bodily motion by the human mind at will. That is, finite minds (spirits) immediately cause motions in their body parts, albeit under the divine conservation. My argument then comports with the conservationist reading from three perspectives: (i) theodicy that the (...) human mind is held liable for sinful actions; (ii) an account of the human mind influencing other minds; and (iii) an improper but necessary directing principle of the human mind. This article is a stepping stone to grasping why the conservationist reading is more coherent than the occasionalist one. (shrink)

Os dois ensaios aqui traduzidos: “Uma visita a uma glândula pineal”, publicado originalmente em 21 de abril de 1713 no número 35 do Guardian e a “A glândula pineal (continuação)”, publicado no dia 25 de abril, no número 39, formam uma unidade não apenas pela referência a ideia de glândula pineal concebida por Descartes como ponto de interação entre a alma e o corpo, mas também pela forma literária e pelo pseudônimo comum. Eles fazem parte de um conjunto de quatorze (...) ensaios atribuídos a George Berkeley, reunidos e publicados pela primeira vez apenas em 1871, no volume III da edição organizada por A. C. Fraser. Os ensaios publicados no Guardian foram escritos durante a permanência de Berkeley em Londres em 1713, quando Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) e Richard Steele (1672-1729), seus conterrâneos, contribuiriam para lhe abrir caminho no ambiente literário inglês. O principal objetivo de Berkeley ao publicar os ensaios foi o de defender o teísmo cristão contra os “livre-pensadores” da época, assumidos como materialistas e ateus. A tradução aqui apresentada foi realizada com base na edição organizada por Luce e Jessop. The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E. London and Edimburgh: Nelson, 1948, v. 7, 185-192. (shrink)

At the risk of proving myself such a caviller, I want to ask a question which I have seldom heard raised, and which I have never seen discussed in anything that I have read about Berkeley. If I am right, it poses a problem for his immaterialism, not only different, but coming from a different direction, from those objections that are commonly levelled against him. If I am wrong, it will show how right Berkeley was to stress the difficulty of (...) using for one purpose our language which has become fashioned for another. At least, I hope that I shall not fail to be the ‘fair and ingenuous reader’for whom he asked. (shrink)

Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’, Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being … entirely distinct’ from its ideas. Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent beings’ that must be (...) supported by a mental substance. There is no doubt that Berkeley's conception of the relationship between minds and ideas is non-traditional, but that fact does not undercut his commitment to the traditional conception of substance. (shrink)

The Author considers the strengths and weaknesses of Berkeley’s account of what he calls indifferently the soul, mind, spirit or self. Such an account deserves far more credit than he has standardly been awarded for a significantly modern position, most of which has mistakenly been credited to Schopenhauer. The Aauthor relates Berkeley’s views to those recently expressed by Bill Brewer and attempts to isolate the crucial difference between Berkeley and Schopenhauer.

That the legacy of Berkeley's philosophy has been a largely sceptical one is perhaps rather surprising. For he himself took it as one of his objectives to undermine scepticism. He roundly denied that there were ‘any principles more opposite to Scepticism than those we have laid down’ . Yet Hume was to write of Berkeley that ‘most of the writings of that very ingenious author form the best lessons of scepticism, Bayle not excepted’. And it has become something of a (...) commonplace to say that Berkeley's philosophy is sceptical in direction, if not in intention. He is represented as a half-hearted sceptic, applying radical empiricist principles in his treatment of matter but baulking at their implications when he came to consider spirits. Hume is credited with being the more thoroughgoing of the two. Berkeley had denied the substantiality of extended things. Hume felt obliged, by parity of reasoning, to deny the substantiality of the self. On his account of the mind there is ‘properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different’ . It is commonly supposed that Berkeley, in maintaining the quite contrary view that we know ourselves to be simple, undivided beings , showed a lack of rigour or consistency. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is a paradigm shift in George Berkeley's philosophy between his early, unpublished manuscripts (1707-1708) and the Theory of Vision (1709). If so, the traditional method of mixing published and unpublished material will lead to a confused picture of both his early, unpublished view and the doctrine that he published. Cet article montre qu'il y a eu un changement de paradigme dans la philosophie de Berkeley entre ses premiers manuscrits, non publiés, de 1707-1708 et (...) la Théorie de la vision de 1709. Dans ces conditions, la méthode d'analyse traditionnelle consistant à mêler textes publiés et non publiés ne peut conduire qu'à fausser la représentation tant de ses premières idées restées inédites que de la doctrine qu'il a publiée. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns an important dispute between George Berkeley and David Hume. The dispute involves Berkeley's defense of his conception of the self as a spirit, a purely active being which perceives ideas; and Hume's elimination of that conception via his own, according to which the self is merely a heap, a causally connected system of perceptions. At bottom, this difference in the way that the self is conceptualized is informed by a fundamental difference in philosophical starting-point. Berkeley seeks to (...) extricate philosophers from skepticism and perplexity; and he desires to restore them to virtue by demonstrating the natural immortality of the soul. Hume, by contrast, wants to construct a science of the mind; and he hopes to encourage modesty in philosophical opinion by promoting a skepticism about bold metaphysical doctrines such as the immortality of the soul. ;Since Berkeley's account has frequently been dismissed as inconsequential, while Hume's account has been accorded philosophical honor, a large part of this project consists in demonstrating the worth of the former. In chapter I, I defend Berkeley's conception of spirit against a traditional objection that it is really just a conflicted Humean account. I argue that a demonstration of the immortality of the soul is central to Berkeley's agenda, flowing from his deep distinction between spirit and idea. In chapter II, I argue that Berkeley effectively abandons the Aristotelian/scholastic distinction between substance and accident, thereby leading him to draw this distinction between spirit and idea. In chapter III, I show how this ontological transformation leads Berkeley to deny that spirit can be perceived, and thereby provides him with a response to skepticism about the soul. In chapter IV, I argue that Hume theoretically eliminates Berkeleian spirit by reconceptualizing the self as a heap of perceptions, motivated by his project of constructing a science of the mind. (shrink)

By focusing on the exchange between Descartes and Hobbes on how the self is related to its activities, Berkeley draws attention to how he and Hobbes explain the forensic constitution of human subjectivity and moral/political responsibility in terms of passive obedience and conscientious submission to the laws of the sovereign. Formulated as the language of nature or as pronouncements of the supreme political power, those laws identify moral obligations by locating political subjects within those networks of sensible signs. When thus (...) juxtaposed with Hobbes, Berkeley can be understood as endorsing a theologically inflected version of deontological ethics in which moral laws are linked directly to the constitution of the self. (shrink)

In several essays I have argued that Berkeley maintains the same basic notion of spiritual substance throughout his life. Because that notion is not the traditional (Aristotelian, Cartesian, or Lockean) doctrine of substance, critics (e.g., John Roberts, Tom Stoneham, Talia Mae Bettcher, Margaret Atherton, Walter Ott, Marc Hight) claim that on my reading Berkeley either endorses a Humean notion of substance or has no recognizable theory of substance at all. In this essay I point out how my interpretation does not (...) assume that Berkeley adopts a bundle theory of mind, but instead redefines what it means for a simple substance to be the principle by which ideas are perceived. (shrink)

In the classical era, imagination garnered poor press: fooling the senses, perverting judgment, subverting reason, skewing social relations, and generally providing wrong ideas about the way things are; it was a faculty of which to beware. Occasionally it was recognized as not being entirely without value—Descartes, for example, insisted on its great usefulness as a figurational function in simplifying the work of the understanding in geometry. The traditional tendency in philosophy, though, was to denigrate imagination for its misleading nature and (...) negative effects and to dwell on its limits as a faculty bound to the body. Indeed, its first function is to represent to the mind things previously perceived by the senses as images in their likeness. But as imagination has neither the same vividness nor the same order as sensation, it is potentially misleading, since in fact images look only approximately the same as their models. Above all, however, imagination was reproached to be potentially misleading for its second function, the creation of images or entire fictions bearing no relation whatsoever to reality, which made it dangerously capable of nourishing all manner of superstition and fantasy. Within such a context, Berkeley’s conception of the imagination hardly seems original at first glance. But as I will propose, in its creative guidance of reason, imagination plays an important and distinctive role in Berkeley’s scientific, moral, and religious discussions. Rather than focusing solely on the representational character of imagination, then, I suggest that we attend also to the way in which Berkeley appeals to the imaginative aspects of reason itself. In this way, we can better appreciate the educational presuppositions of human freedom. (shrink)

Berkeley's opposition to materialism of all sorts is explored and explained. The textual evidence locates Berkeley in the 17th and 18th century tradition which saw materialism as the main source of religious and moral scepticism, and Berkeley's approach is clarified by a comparison with the criticisms of materialism presented by some of his less well known predecessors and contemporaries. The accepted account of the development of Berkeley's immaterialism is explored and rejected. ;The precise way in which spirit, both finite and (...) infinite, replaces matter is studied at length. For example, the accepted accounts of Berkeley's view of the role of God in guaranteeing the continued existence of unperceived objects are rejected, and an attempt is made to present an alternative account. Attention is also devoted to the role of God in sustaining and presenting to us all sensible ideas all of the time, including when they are perceived. The nature and operation of the spirit is examined, and the will, which is the distinctive component of the Berkeleian spirit, is shown to be operative in perception. An attempt is made to reject accounts of the Berkeleian will which would make it only the occasionalist cause of boidly motion. It is plain that Berkeley's metaphysical views are at odds with his assumption that we actually move our bodies, but I suggest, in opposition to some commentators, that in order to make him consistent, we do not need to make the will merely an occasional cause of bodily motion. (shrink)

This paper investigates Isaac Newton's rather unique account of God's relation to matter. According to this account, corpuscles depend on a substantially omnipresent God endowing quantities of objective space with the qualities of shape, solidity, the unfaltering tendency to move in accord with certain laws, and—significantly—the power to interact with created minds. I argue that there are important similarities and differences between Newton's account of matter and Berkeley's idealism. And while the role played by the divine will might at first (...) appear to be a species of occasionalism, I conclude that there are, for Newton, genuine causal relations between minds and bodies. Ultimately, to fully appreciate this account of the creation and persistence of matter, we must consider not only Newton's metaphysical writings, but also his sensorium theory of mind-body interaction, his heterodox theological commitments, and the influences of Descartes, More, and Locke. (shrink)

The popular Cartesian reading of George Berkeley's philosophy of mind mischaracterizes his views on the relations between substance and essence and between an idea and the act of thought in which it figures. I argue that Berkeley rejects Descartes's tripartite taxonomy of distinctions and makes use of a fourth kind of distinction. In addition to illuminating Berkeley's ontology of mind, this fourth distinction allows us to dissolve an important dilemma raised by Kenneth Winkler.

Berkeley has been notoriously charged with inconsistency because he held that spiritual substance exists, Although he argued against the existence of material substance. Berkeley is only inconsistent on the assumption that his argument in favor of spiritual substance parallels the rejected argument for material substance. I show that berkeley is relying on quite a different argument, One perfectly consistent with his theory of ideas, Based on presuppositions the germs of which can be found in the thought of his predecessors in (...) the theory of ideas, Descartes and locke. (shrink)

Clues about what Berkeley was planning to say about mind in his now-lost second volume of the Principles seem to abound in his Notebooks. However, commentators have been reluctant to use his unpublished entries to explicate his remarks about spiritual substances in the Principles and Dialogues for three reasons. First, it has proven difficult to reconcile the seemingly Humean bundle theory of the self in the Notebooks with Berkeley's published characterization of spirits as “active beings or principles.” Second, the fact (...) that Berkeley did not publish his Notebooks insights on mind has led some to claim that he later rejected his early views. Third, many of the Notebooks entries on mind have a ‘+’ sign next to them, which has been understood for decades to comprise a Black List of views about which Berkeley had doubts or subsequently rejected. In my dialogue, I describe how Berkeley's “congeries” account of mind (1) differs from Hume's bundle theory in a way that complements Berkeley's published remarks and (2) undercuts the claim that he later rejected his early views. Most importantly, (3) I show how a careful analysis of the British Library manuscript of the Notebooks refutes the Black List hypothesis. (shrink)

La place qu'occupe l'imagination dans la philosophie berkeleyenne semble ne pas poser de problème et n'être en rien originale, consistant en une simple reprise de la position lockéenne. Pourtant, en attribuant une spontanéité créatrice à l'imagination, qui en fait une faculté tout à fait particulière, et en insistant sur la puissance et les limites de cette même faculté, Berkeley réintroduit subrepticement un principe de différenciation au plan épistémologique, que l'on peut retrouver mutatis mutandis au plan moral à travers son opposition (...) à la libre pensée. It may seem that Berkeley's treatment of imagination is neither problematic, nor original, in so far as he simply seems to repeat what Locke has said on this subject. However, Berkeley attributes to imagination a creative spontaneity that makes it a very special faculty, and he insists on the power (and limits) of this faculty in a very particular way. In so doing, he surreptitiously reintroduces a principle of differentiation at the epistemological level, one that can also, mutatis mutandis, be found at the moral level in his opposition to the free thinkers. (shrink)