Bishop Berkeley and John Foster on Problems with Physical Realism about Space

Abstract

AbstractThe early sections consider two arguments about the nature of space that occur in Berkeley. The first concerns the phenomenology of space, the second its physics. The first is the ‘mite’ argument and the second concerns Newton’s two thought experiments about absolute space, the ‘bucket’ thought experiment and the ‘balls’ thought experiment. It is argued that they strengthen support for an idealist approach to space. Next is a major argument of John Foster’s. It moves in two steps. The first involves the refutation of naïve or direct realism, leaving the realist with a traditional representative realism as his best option. Given Part I of this book, this is taken as achieved. The second step of Foster’s argument consists in the claim that a world that lies beyond experience—a Transcendental World (TW)—need not have the same topology as the physical world (PW) and that, therefore, the space of the TW is not physical space. If the space of TW is not physical space, TW is not the physical world. This is given the intuitive premise that spaces which have different topologies cannot be the same space—a space cannot have two inconsistent topologies at once. This would seem to be a simple case of Leibniz’s law.