Berkeley on Divine and Human Agency

Abstract

In Chapter 8, James S. Spiegel investigates whether George Berkeley is best seen as an occasionalist or as a kind of concurrentist. Berkeley’s defense of the immaterialist thesis that “to be is to be perceived” is largely taken as support for occasionalism. After all, if God is the cause of all of our sensory ideas, it seems that there is little room for efficacious human agency. Spiegel points out passages in which Berkeley clearly rejects occasionalism. These texts leave the reader with a puzzle. How is it that Berkeley can hold to efficacious human agency? Following Kenneth Winkler, Spiegel proposes that Berkeley should adopt a complex causal account of concurrentism in which human agents supply the teleological volitional component and God supplies the efficient causal component. Spiegel clarifies this account and notes several of its theoretical benefits. In the end, Berkeley’s account of human and divine agency solves or avoids some conceptual problems in his immaterialist system.