Berkeley's Philosophy Research Articles

G. BERKELEY & F. MATHEWS “LOGOS” ONTOLOGY

The purpose of article’s study is to discover Logos phenomenon which is present in the nature of thinking using an empirical method in the value system of F. Mathews & G. Berkeley from the point of view of modern ethics, historical experience, modern psychology and culture of ecology. “Logos” is considered as a segment of the field of thinking, a certain event in the field of meaning.The meaning of “Logos” as an event in the ontology of F. Mathews is considered from a metaphysical point of view and acquires a special semantic value in the context of G. Berkeley philosophy. In the space-time continuum, “Logos” exists in a moving field of meanings and is opposed to “Nonthought.” In the course of history, the manifestation of “Logos” was absorbed by everyday life and mediocrity, but F. Mathews and G. Berkeley are trying to prevent the disappearance of “Logos” by creating an “Ecological Model of Thinking”, revealing perception from internal semantic structures towards natural phenomena. An ecological model of thinking can prevent the formation of a “perceptual dead zone” where human genius is devalued by self-centered mediocrity. The phenomenon of the integrity of the "Logos" is an ethical expression of intuitive perception.The causes and consequences of "ontological inertia" are also revealed.

Letters of Jack B. Yeats to Joseph Hone, 1921–1955

Letters of Jack B. Yeats to Joseph Hone, 1921–1955 Steven Hrdlicka Jack B. Yeats wrote more than fifty letters to Joseph Hone over a period of thirty-four years which now reside in the Yeats Family Correspondence Collection at the University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library. These letters, and other materials, are part of the extensive P. S. O'Hegarty collection that KU acquired from O'Hegarty's wife, Mina, in 1955. Yeats's letters to Hone, as yet unpublished, contain the Irish painter's thoughts on a number of important issues, some of the most attractive of which are his numerous casual observations on art, painting, and philosophy, of great interest if only because the artist spoke so little about art during his life. Aside from a lecture Yeats gave on painting at the Irish Race Congress held in Paris in January 1922 (which was printed later that year as Modern Aspects of Irish Art and has been out of print since), these letters contain some of the painter's only surviving thoughts upon his craft, and in many ways both confirm and add depth to the observations he gave in the formal lecture.1 Yeats's reflections in the letters on painting, art in general, and Ireland are important to consider alongside the comments Thomas MacGreevy advanced in Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and Interpretation, published in 1945.2 The letters in the collection from 1921 contain many of the painting topics that Yeats would raise in the lecture he gave about a year later. Yet there is much more of interest in the letters: the painter's insights into society, art, and politics frequently intertwine with his personality as well as his painting theory. One early example is his criticism of a play by his good friend John Masefield, demonstrating the characteristic casual philosophical depth with which Yeats often wrote.3 [End Page 111] Aside from all of this, perhaps the most important material in the letters for Yeats scholars has to do with the addressee Joseph Hone. Hone was a prolific author who wrote numerous articles on the subjects of politics, literature, and philosophy for the New Statesman, London Mercury, and the Dublin Magazine between 1907 and 1953. He authored a number of books beginning in the 1930s, such as one coauthored with Mario Rossi on Bishop George Berkeley's philosophy (1931, featuring an introduction by W. B. Yeats); The Life of George Moore (1936); the first biography of W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1942); and the first edition of a collection of John Butler Yeats's letters (1944). In addition, Hone was a translator of German and Italian (he published a translation of Daniel Halévy's Life of Friedrich Nietzsche). He also cofounded, with James Starkey, in 1905 Maunsel & Co., which would publish many important authors of the Irish Literary Renaissance, such as J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Æ (George Russell), Stephen Gwynn, and of course W. B. Yeats.4 In fact, as R. F. Foster points out, W. B. Yeats's desire to have his works published by an Irish publisher led him to woo A. H. Bullen as a backer to get the company started.5 Hone certainly helped thrust W. B. Yeats forward, and this is particularly evident in the short literary biography he published in 1915 entitled William Butler Yeats: The Poet in Contemporary Ireland.6 In addition to the material on painting noted above, the letters Jack B. Yeats wrote to Joseph Hone contain much information regarding family matters, such as the circumstances surrounding W. B. Yeats's death, as well as some back and forth about what should not be included in the 1944 edition of John Butler Yeats's letters. Finally, there are also numerous letters that discuss prominent literary figures and politics; it is no secret that Jack Yeats had personal acquaintance with a number of important writers such as Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw. It is clear that on some occasions Jack Yeats seeks to suppress certain information that Hone would have known due to his closeness both to W. B. and John Butler Yeats. While Hone was editing a...

Early American Immaterialism: Samuel Johnson's Emendations of Berkeley

This paper analyzes Berkeley's correspondence during his American sojourn of 1729–31 with the Connecticut philosopher and theologian Samuel Johnson, an early and influential convert to Berkeleianism. Although these letters have been examined by eminent Berkeley scholars including Jessop, Luce, and Popkin, their treatments of Johnson are not charitable. Contrary to Luce, who asserts that Johnson is "muddled" on several points, and "strikes at the root" of Berkeley's philosophy, I maintain that Johnson offers plausible and friendly amendments to Berkeley's system—concerning (i) archetypes; (ii) space and duration; (iii) the esse of finite spirits—which would help to reconcile Berkeley with Newtonian natural philosophy and with common sense.

How Berkeley's Gardener Knows His Cherry Tree

AbstractThe defense of common sense in Berkeley's Three Dialogues is, first and foremost, a defense of the gardener's claim to know his cherry tree, a claim threatened by both Cartesian and Lockean philosophy. This defense depends on the esse is percipi thesis (EIP). EIP is not something the gardener believes; rather, it is a philosophical analysis of the rules he unreflectively follows in his use of the word ‘exists’. Uncovering these connections between Berkeley's epistemology and philosophy of language will clarify Berkeley's strategy for bringing his reader back to common sense and practical engagement in the ordinary affairs of life.

God, nature and language: An essay on Berkeley's philosophy of science

This paper gives a critical account of the precise character of Berkeley's fictionalism and instrumentalism in his philosophy of science. Two replies are given to the objections typically raised against his vision of science and its incompatibility with the scientific practice. The first objection claims that his immaterialism is incompatible with the natural causation, and the second that it is not able to give an explanation for the complex structure of issues raised by natural sciences. The replies rely on Berkeley's thesis concerning the language of God, claiming that there are no causal but only semantic relations between the signs and the signified in the world. The system of nature constitutes a language which God uses to communicate with the finite creatures.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The quantum adventure: does God play dice?

Newton, the Classical Atom Planck and the Birth of the Quantum Adventure Light - Wave or Particle? Einstein and the Photoelectric Effect Bohr Introduces Quanta to Atoms Hamilton Lays Foundations for Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac Berkeley's Philosophy Einstein's Questions and Paradoxes Quantum Reality and Bell's Inequality.

Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology, and the Elusive Subject, by Talia Mae Bettcher.

Bettcher’s unique book will be a welcome addition to Berkeleian studies. Its topic is difficult since the philosophy of spirit was supposed to be treated in the second part of Berkeley’s Principles, a part that was never published leaving the whole system of immaterialism a torso. Commentators generally devote one chapter in their monographs, or an article in a journal, to Berkeley’s views on spirit, remarking that there is not much of it and what there is, is problematic; and that the second part of the Principles never appeared precisely because Berkeley himself realized that his account of spirit is incoherent. Not so Bettcher, as she mines here enough material for a book, one that is structured, compact, and where the argument naturally evolves throughout. Her charitable interpretation culminates in a rearrangement of the traditional story about the emergence of the modern conception of subject, where Descartes and Locke are linked with their successors Hume and Kant by the almost invisible but all-important Berkeley.

Reexamining Berkeley's philosophy

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is perhaps most famous for his assertion that our knowledge of the world is nothing other than the experience of our ideas. Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy examines this aspect of Berkeley's thought, arguing that such a viewpoint assumes that physical objects and minds are better understood when discussed in the contexts of science, morality, and religion. This collection confronts the question: how can we know anything about the world if all we know are our ideas? Comprised of eleven previously unpublished essays by leading scholars in the field, Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy demonstrates how things in the world are intrinsically related to the sequence of experiences that constitute minds. This collection also discusses how the harmony of experience reveals strategies for recognizing the inherently active character of reality. Ultimately, this volume represents a major contribution to the study of Berkeley's philosophy by critiquing the tendency to generalize his thought as a version of theologically modified solipsism. In this way, it is a unique and invaluable addition to Berkeley scholarship.

Berkeley and Gentile

My purpose is to compare Berkeley's and Gentile's idealism, interpreting Berkeley's Treatise, §§22-23, and Gentile's reading of this passage. The Italian philosopher finds in Berkeley's master argument the original source of the true idealistic way of thinking, but he believes that Berkeley has not been sufficiently consistent in deducing all the consequences from his new principle. This criticism is the ground of Gentile's actual idealism. Comparing the two positions is very instructive both to elucidate the general issue of idealism and to understand Berkeley's philosophy.

Berkeley au siecle des lumieres. Immaterialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siecle (review)

Reviewed by: Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle Todd Ryan Sébastien Charles . Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Geneviève Brykman . Paris: Vrin, 2003. Pp. 368. Paper, € 28,00. The reception accorded to Berkeley's immaterialism by eighteenth-century philosophers constitutes one of the great puzzles of early modern philosophy. How is it possible that Berkeley, whose announced purpose in both the Principles and Three Dialogues was to refute "Skeptics and Atheists," should quickly come to be seen as the foremost champion of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and indeed of atheistic solipsism? To be sure the caricature of philosophical opponents for polemical purposes is hardly limited to Berkeley. Yet from the [End Page 495] modern point of view Berkeley, the "good Bishop" who tirelessly insisted on the consonance of immaterialism with common sense, as well as the indispensable role of God as cause of our ideas of sense, seems a rather unlikely candidate for the near universal hostility—one might even say vilification—that was to be his lot. Forty years ago Harry M. Bracken attempted to unravel this paradox in his classic study The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Through a careful and philosophically informed examination of early accounts of Berkeley's immaterialism, Bracken argued that the distorted image of Berkeley that was to become the common currency of Enlightenment thinkers had its origin in the earliest accounts of Berkeley's work, most notably a pair of reviews in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux, and a vituperative attack on "the atheism of the Immaterialists" by Father Tournemine. According to Bracken, the image of Berkeley as a radical disciple of Malebranche who pushed the Oratorian's philosophy to its logical conclusion by denying the existence of matter was promoted by the Jesuits as part of their theological and political struggle against Cartesianism. It was also in these early reviews that Berkeley's name was first associated with the legendary "egoist" philosopher who in addition to denying the existence of material substance, further claimed that his was the only created spirit in existence. Sébastien Charles's impressive new study extends Bracken's work by carefully documenting the dissemination of this distorted image of Berkeley throughout the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Charles's book is a comprehensive and impressively erudite survey of the use (and misuse) of Berkeley in the writings of the philosophes, as well as later thinkers, including the Idéologues and members of the Berlin Academy. Sadly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, the texts that Charles surveys afford little critical insight to interpreters of Berkeley. The misreadings of Berkeley are so egregious and so pervasive that the philosophy of the Principles and Three Dialogues is generally disfigured beyond recognition. Indeed, even to speak of a "misreading" of Berkeley is somewhat misleading, since many of those who took up the task of refuting immaterialism seem not to have read him at all. However, Charles's aim is much less to shed interpretive light on Berkeley's philosophy than to rectify the long-standing image of the eighteenth century as an era of unbridled epistemological optimism. Emphasizing the confrontations with radical skepticism to be found in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Rousseau and Diderot, La Mettrie and Destutt de Tracy, Charles argues that far from ignoring the threat of radical skepticism, materialists and dualists, deists and Christians made common cause in their struggle against what they took to be Berkeley's alleged "egoism." Indeed, for Charles, "the question of solipsism was the central problem for the metaphysics of the Enlightenment." The ubiquity of references to Berkeley among these thinkers certainly argues in favor of Charles's thesis. Yet the attempt to survey such a large number of authors frequently necessitates an abbreviated treatment that renders difficult the task of assessing the relative importance of the confrontation with radical skepticism in any individual thinker's system. Further, the very weakness and formulaic character of the attempted refutations might reasonably raise suspicions as to whether the threat of solipsism was taken as seriously as Charles maintains...

Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley's Philosophy of Money

Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley's Philosophy of Money

L'immatérialisme, allié naturel ou ennemi désigné des philosophes chrétiens

The aim of Berkeley's philosophy, as indicated in the subtitle of the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, was to attack scepticism and atheism ; it seemed therefore destined to become a reference, or even the inspiration, for those 18th-century Christian thinkers who wanted to counter contemporary mate¬ rialism and atheism. Despite a few exceptions, however, this was not the case, and they were more concerned to refute Berkeley's immaterialism. The Jesuits were particularly responsible for this treatment of it, but they were not the only ones. In the face of scepticism and egoism, Christian thinkers generally agreed that the existence of internal feelings should necessarily convince the solipsist of his own existence, and that immaterialism, seen as solipsism, was a pernicious doctrine as it undermined the cosmological proof of the existence of God and the doctrine of the creation of a substantial world ex nihilo, independent of the perception of the creatures who inhabit it.

L'immatérialisme dans la littérature clandestine du siècle des Lumières

AbstractIf research devoted to the clandestine literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is today enjoying considerable expansion in the scholarly world, it tends, nonetheless, to be restricted to materialist considerations. However, other themes are open to exploration, such as the immaterialist one which is explicitly mentioned in two manuscripts (theRéflections morales et métaphisiques sur les religions et sur les connoissances de l'hommeand theJordanus Brunus Redivivus). After presenting and analyzing these two texts, we argue that this clandestine account of immaterialism could explain both the evolution of this theory during the Enlightenment and the misunderstanding of Berkeley's philosophy.

Bourdieu and Common Sense

roots go back to the Greek terms koinos nous (common mind-the mental equipment we all, presumably, bear), koine aisthesis (common perceptual sense, on which I will elaborate below), and koine ennoia (common notions, beliefs or ideas). The Latin term sensus communis uneasily combines all these senses, a fact that accounts perhaps for some of the continuing vagueness of its definitions (Bugter 83-84). In one form or another, the phrase has never gone out of use, but as a result of its complex history, it does seem at times to carry contradictory meanings. Sometimes common sense is that plain feet-on-the-ground sense of reality available to any clear-thinking person, which can emerge when all the fancy talk of the so-called experts is swept away. Alternatively, common sense is quite the opposite: that collection of provincial, conventional wisdom, superstition, and false consciousness that can be recognized as such and overcome through rigorous thought, rationality, and science. Does common sense refer to those universal properties of mind, rationality, and sense that all humans have in common? Or does it signify the fact that we are all members of particular and specific social and historical communities of sense and knowledge?' It is instructive to note that while Samuel Johnson's famous kick at a stone has long been understood as a defense of common sense against Berkeley's philosophy, Berkeley himself understood his own philosophical work to be a defense of common sense. While skeptical commonsense thinking, with its ability to debunk and demystify, found Enlightenment defenders and champions from Descartes to Voltaire to Thomas Reid, a concurrent strain of philosophical inquiry-sometimes including the same thinkers-understood common sense itself to be that body of received ideas that must be overcome by means of skeptical philosophical reflection. More recently, G.E. Moore has explored the articulation of common sense in ordinary language, while Chomsky's work has occasioned a related debate on the idea of common notions and innate knowledge. An excellent

The Artist as Universal Mind: Berkeley's Influence on Charles Johnson

C_ harles Johnson's volume of short stories The Sorcerer's Apprentice opposes the artist's imaginative world to a naive realism that reduces all objects to their sheer materialistic value. In general terms, the negative characters of Johnson's stories are all materialists, and their world view postulates a mind-independent universe of physical objects obeying laws of force, energy, and economics. Against these characters, Johnson deploys metaphorical artists whose job it is symbolically to restructure the world into spiritual patterns, restoring a cohesive sense of connectedness. The controlling motif of the volume is a competition of alternative metaphysics, pitting the artist who creates reality against the skeptical materialist who would segment and divide it. In opposing the artist to the materialist, Johnson explores alternative metaphysical positions of Realism and Idealism-the two fundamentally different ways people conceive of their world, think about their world, and make crucial decisions about their world and other people. Johnson intends to jolt emotionally the assumed realist reader into an entirely different perception of the world, making him/her forego a customary, conditioned, and ordinary version of material reality in favor of a more expansive and aesthetic sense of the world. Johnson reveals himself to be an Idealist whose mission is to persuade his readers of the philosophical claims of Idealism, a vocational calling that he has made his own in interviews and his book Being & Race. Johnson writes that the purpose of all great is beyond conventional morality; it is to challenge our metaphysics: Our perception-or way of seeing-has been shaken, if one is talking about great art (Being 4). Johnson's artist combats the Age of Hype (xi)-the province of the marketplace-to establish an intellectual justification for his or her art. In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Bishop George Berkeley's metaphysics guides Johnson's thematics, for in Berkeley's philosophy, Johnson discovers his ally against what he envisions as a reductionist world view. A commercialized version of the world is based, for Johnson, on a materialist metaphysics. This essay will investigate the Berkeleyan framework that Johnson employs, then apply it to two stories in the volume, Menagerie and China. Menagerie satirizes a world that banishes Berkeleyan Idealism in favor of a crass materialism, while China enacts the performance of the artist as Divine Creator. The stories depict the conflict between the Artist and the Marketplace in philosophical terms, with Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne used metaphorically in each story. Berkeley's philosophy assists Johnson in arguing for a view of the world appropriate to his own exalted vision of the

Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics.

In this first modern, critical assessment of the place of mathematics in Berkeley's philosophy and Berkeley's place in the history of mathematics, Douglas M. Jesseph provides a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley's work. Jesseph challenges the prevailing view that Berkeley's mathematical writings are peripheral to his philosophy and argues that mathematics is in fact central to his thought, developing out of his critique of abstraction. Jesseph's argument situates Berkeley's ideas within the larger historical and intellectual context of the Scientific Revolution. Jesseph begins with Berkeley's radical opposition to the received view of mathematics in the philosophy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when mathematics was considered a science of abstractions. Since this view seriously conflicted with Berkeley's critique of abstract ideas, Jesseph contends that he was forced to come up with a nonabstract philosophy of mathematics. Jesseph examines Berkeley's unique treatments of geometry and arithmetic and his famous critique of the calculus in The Analyst. By putting Berkeley's mathematical writings in the perspective of his larger philosophical project and examining their impact on eighteenth-century British mathematics, Jesseph makes a major contribution to philosophy and to the history and philosophy of science.

Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics. Douglas M. Jesseph

<i>Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics</i>. Douglas M. Jesseph

Berkeley's Ontology.

This original new work takes a sharply focused look at Berkeley's ontology and provides a fuller understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand, Berkeley's nominalism and antiabstractionism and, on the other, his principal arguments for idealism and his attempts to square his idealism with common sense. Drawing heavily on detailed textual analysis, historical context, and careful examination of the work of other scholars, Muehlmann challenges, modifies, rejects, and exploits some well-established interpretations of Berkeley's philosophy.

The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy.

The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy.