Dear Professor Ott. I have enjoyed your work on Malebranche and I'm now considering Berkeley's doctrine of the passivity of ideas. In Principles 25 he argues that essentially if we looks closely at our ideas (objects of sense) we'll come to see (1) they are passive, (2) a stronger stronger claim--it's impossible that they be active--thus non-minded nature must be causally inert. (2) Seems the right way to go--the argument as J Bennett (Learning from Six Philosophers) suggests is a priori; from the doctrine that to be is to be perceived it logically follows that nature is causally inert. I don't quite see the deduction--both K Winkler (Berkeley) and G Strawson (The Secret Connexion) have outlined how the argument might go, but I'm not convinced. Recently Jeff McDonough (J Phil argued that with respect to Berkeley's claim that 'against Malebranche we move our limbs ourselves,' a concurrentist account might save Berkeley from the consequent problem that both God and  finite agents create objects of sense. I wonder whether conurrentism could be extended so that esse est percipi also  permits natural efficient causality.

Regards
Dick Brook