THE RAMIST CONTEXT OF BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Few commentators have ever tried to explain why Berkeley would have found the views of his contemporaries so utterly wrong-headed. No doubt, there are internal problems with attempts to reconcile the claim that substances exist independently of our perceptions with the claim that our ideas represent those substances. But instead of trying to solve those problems using assumptions that generate the problems in the erst place, Berkeley adopts an alternative ontology that emphasizes the semantic or semiotic character of reality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Berkeley’s doctrine of the notions of mind, actions, and relations. Often treated almost as an afterthought, this doctrine challenges Cartesian and Lockean principles by pointing out how mind in particular cannot be understood as if it were some object of thought, because objects of thought are ideas, not the minds that have those ideas. Furthermore, ideas cannot be said to represent or be like independently existing substances other than ideas because any such substance would still be an object of thought. For Berkeley, minds and ideas are so different from the substantialist and representationist ways they are portrayed by Descartes and Locke that to describe his philosophy in their terms would be to risk imposing on him the very mentality that his doctrines are intended to reject. Even though Berkeley discusses the objects of mind (i.e. ideas) erst, he assumes that we can do so only by virtue of their having been identieed or cognized by mind. This means that, in order to appreciate his alternate ‘way of ideas’, we have to consider mind as the means by which we understand ideas. In contrast to Cartesian or Lockean accounts, we do not begin by assuming that we have ideas of things, one of which just happens to be mind. Rather, we have to treat mind as that in terms of which a thing is identieed in relation to other things. Accordingly, to say that something has an identity or is intelligible simply means that we have a notion of it, and the having of that notion is what it means to be a mind. Talking about mind this way will sound strange to someone immersed in the substantialist mindset of Cartesian and Lockean metaphysics. But it allows us to ask questions that are almost universally ignored in Berkeley