Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (review)

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BOOK REVIEWS 437 Berkeley. Yolton presents the world Hume describes as one largely provided by imagination, and then concludes PerceptualAcquaintancewith the sentences: Many of the writers we have examined took such knowledge [of a world of external objects] to be direct, in the sense that our cognitive responses are to objects, not in the sense that objects are in some mysterious, mystical way absorbed by, incorporated into the mind. There are lessons to be learned from Arnauld, from Berkeley, and from Hume about what is and is not, about what can and cannot be direct awareness of objects. Before we can profit from those writers, we must correct the long misunderstanding of their doctrines. (~22) The question is, does Yolton seriously mean to imply that Berkeley and Hume are direct realists in the vulgar sense? In conclusion, Yolton presents a very provocative--but highly condensed and often puzzling because of what is left out--direct-realist interpretation of the way of ideas from Descartes to Reid. He eviscerates selected texts of two centuries to discover a development of ideas that underwrites contemporary concerns in linguistic philosophy and philosophical psychology. This is a challenge to those historians who have followed the same course to discover---exactly contrary to Yolton--that Berkeley and Hume are the direct predecessors of the sense-datum theories of Russell and Carnap. Yolton is certainly right about the distinction between Arnauld's perceptionidea and Malebranche's entity-idea. But Yolton's sympathy for the claim that cognizing is just cognizing is too unqualified, for the problems of error and of counterfactuals rule out as unsatisfactory the position that cognizing is a simple or unanalyzable act. Finally, there are so many lacunae, confusions, opacities, and problems in the notions (1) that an idea just is the act of direct perceptual acquaintance with external objects, and (2) that cognitive content or meaning is solely epistemic and non-ontic, that these difficulties in themselves stand as a severe obstacle to accepting Yolton's revision of doctrine. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University John Richetti, PhilosophicalWriting: Locke,Berkeley,Hume. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 . Pp. 287 . $25.oo. John Richetti's book is a welcome attempt to dissolve the arbitrary boundaries between "philosophy" and "literature," the sort of project rendered fashionable by current trends in French philosophy. (See for example, Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology,' and the work of Paul de Man, whom Richetti cites.) The study celebrates those habits of style which disturb ordinary analytic expectations or which "enact" or "stage" the authors' peculiar intentions or hesitancies: the "philosopher," we discover, has metamorphosed into a narrator of (or even dramatic character in) his own text. For example , Locke's Essay"is essentially a comic, quasi-novelistic document" (111). Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, t976). 438 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY ~985 Moreover, we learn that "the situation Locke evokes in the Essay accustoms the reader to a world of paradox, inconsistency, description, change, and even unexpected transformation" (111); and Locke persuades us to accept the "partially revealed" nature of reality and remain "satisfied with the ironic certainty of uncertainty" (ibid.). Berkeley draws the reader more propulsively towards a clear and eagerly-awaited telos--the rhapsodic vision of Siris. Despite Berkeley's linguistic scepticism, his writing forges an overarching parallel metaphor of language and vision (146) in which, paradoxically , "our constructions in visual perception resemble our constructions in reading , and by extension and intensification, this kind of reading reveals being and divinity " (165). And lastly, Hume's urbanity provides a forum in which his irony helps both to "dramatize" the problematic "epistemologicai scene" and ultimatcly to contain and redirect it towards the social ends the style itself adumbrates. Since this review appears in a philosophical journal, albeit with a historical bias, we might ask whether Richetti propounds a satisfactory rapprochement between his two potential audiences. I think ultimately not: in explicitly denying a revaluation of what the authors say (47), and by offering, rather, methodologically quite conventional stylistic "readings," we must treat the book primarily as a sophisticated "literary " vindication of prose works which students and teachers of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature have...