Abstract

Berkeley’s passionate devotion to common sense and, hence, opposition to that most odious of doctrines, skepticism regarding the immediate data of experience, requires his acceptance of certain fundamental and common-sensical beliefs in both epistemology and metaphysics which, I shall argue, are together inconsistent. Epistemologically, he is often required to identify and reduce the physical world to the perceptual world. Metaphysically, he must often identify the perceptual world with what we ordinarily think of as the physical world—the everyday world of common sense; this time the reduction works the other way. Since Berkeley is uniformly committed to common sense, both commitments are present in all of Berkeley’s writings, though both are not usually simultaneously dominant. For Berkeleian scholars convinced Berkeley is consistent, the results are predictable. Those who emphasize certain epistemological arguments tend to treat Berkeley as a relativist. Those who emphasize certain metaphysical arguments treat him as a believer in a public world that has a career of its own. Since any attempt consistently to articulate a common-sense view of things is going to run into difficulties, so also is Berkeley’s; his particular attempt runs into serious inconsistencies.