George Berkeley Research Articles

Berkeley's Doctrine of Bodies as Powers

Abstract Discussions of George Berkeley often dismiss his Notebooks remarks that (1) bodies are powers that cause perceivers to have thoughts, and (2) bodies exist even when they are not perceived. I have previously noted these claims but have not explained how bodies are infinitely linked as thoughts (vs. ideas), and Melissa Frankel treats bodies as archetypes perceived individually by God but does not explain how they are individuated. I argue that because bodies identify objects only for finite minds, they are derivative powers by which individuated objects are related to one another infinitely.

Ancient-Modern Philosophy: George Berkeley and the Reenchantment of the World

Christians from a number of fields have identified Modern philosophy as the cause of serious problems in the contemporary world, especially for the Christian doctrine of God. Modernity in various ways disenchanted the world, but they propose to reenchant it by retrieving early Christian Platonism. In this paper, it is argued that George Berkeley offers an alternative for reenchanting the world, not through the rejection of Modernity but through a Christian Modernity which seizes on the best insights of both ancient and modern philosophy, under the guidance of God’s self-revelation, to present a world infused with the governing activity of the Transcendent God.

The infinite unleashed: Benjamin revisited in the context of the mechanical philosophy

ABSTRACT This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s politico-theological conception of time (the messianic time) against the background of the mechanical philosophy which the Copernican turn brought about. My argument is that the messianic time which intervenes in the mechanical, ‘homogenous, empty time’ shares the formal logic of the divine which intervenes in the Newtonian mathematical space–time via the differential as the non-all (not universal). Newton formulated the mathematical space as ontologically closed by ‘the dominion of One’. But, as George Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s differential shows, the differential comes to reveal the non-all in it. The divine in fact cannot be ontologically closed, leaving the universe divided into the merely mechanical (secular science) and the infinite (the divine as the non-all which does not fit the mechanical). Quentin Meillassoux formulates the mathematical space–time as simultaneously All and non-all too, but with no theological project for interpretation. By contrast, Benjamin’s use of the term the differential shows that he conceives the non-all left from the mechanical as a differential point within the mathematical space–time which enables manifold translations of the divine as the All beyond the mechanical space–time.

When is a disparity not a disparity? Toward an old theory of three-dimensional vision.

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to discuss and analyze the concept of binocular disparity and second, to contrast the traditional "air theory" of three-dimensional vision with the much older "ground theory," first suggested by Ibn al-Haytham more than a thousand years ago. The origins of an "air theory" of perception can be traced back to Descartes and subsequently to the philosopher George Berkeley, who claimed that distance "could not be seen" because points lying along the same line of sight (in an empty space) would all project to the same location on the retina. However, Descartes was also aware that the angle of convergence of the two eyes could solve the problem of the "missing" information for the monocular observer and, since then, most visual scientists have assumed that eye vergence plays an important role both in judging absolute distance and for scaling retinal size and binocular disparities. In contrast, al-Haytham's and Gibson's "ground theories," which are based on the geometry of the textured ground plane surface that has surrounded us throughout evolution and during our lifetimes, are not just more ecologically based but they also obviate the need for disparity scaling.

‘The Young Fellow of Trinity College’: Beckett, Berkeley, and the Genesis of Murphy

The article revisits the reference to the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley in Samuel Beckett's first published novel, Murphy. Previous scholarship assumed that references to Berkeley's theory of immaterialism were inherent to the novel's exploration of the relations between the mind and the world. However a comparison of the novel's manuscript, typescript and the final printed version reveals that they were a relatively late addition. As Beckett was typing up the manuscript in June 1936 he expanded on a previous cryptic allusion to Berkeley, and added two more. Beckett's reluctance to engage with Berkeley in the earlier version may be due in part to his scepticism towards the Irish Revival which adopted the famous philosopher as a national model for Irish thinking. It was Beckett's reading of Arnold Geulincx in 1936, it is argued, that made him revisit Berkeley's views and contrast them with Geulingian ethics which he viewed more favourably. The first reference to Berkeley in the published novel echoes a comparison he made between him and Arnold Geulincx in a letter to McGreevy, highlighting the relevance of this reference point for Beckett's treatment of Berkeley. The denial that Murphy's mind was ‘involved in the idealist tar’ is shown to be subsequent to Beckett's reading of Geulincx. Finally, the reference to ‘percipi’ and ‘percipere’ in the description of Murphy's state following his game of chess with Mr. Endon is correlated with Geulincx's ethics to suggest that, however briefly, Murphy becomes aware of his own impotence.

Continual creation: Idealism, metaphor and the representation of spatio-temporality

In this examination of spatio-temporality’s representation in two- and three-dimensional video games, diegetic time and how a game’s overriding metaphors may be reflected in both gameplay and a storyworld’s virtual environment are considered at length through the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, with an important adaptation of what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as ‘information-time’ experienced by conscious players operating in ‘memory-time’. After considering a number of examples from Outer Wilds and the Legend of Zelda franchise, the question as to whether video games are ontically presentist is resolved by way of a synthesis between the expression of time in spatial terms and every video game’s minimum of interactivity, a distinction I adapt from Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The continual creation of a digital world, while materially a fact of hardware limitations, is shown to lend itself metaphorically to an eidetic reading, bound to our intuitive association of time and space with inhabitation.

Chris Townsend. George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language

Occasionally a monograph comes along that so adroitly fills a gap in our knowledge of Romanticism that one’s first reaction is surprise that the gap was not noticed earlier. Chris Townsend’s fine study, George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language, is such a book. Given that Berkeley was widely read by many Romantic writers, it is curious that he does not feature more prominently in scholarship on philosophical Romanticism. Townsend’s thorough and detailed analysis remedies this oversight; furthermore, he suggests that, like Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking ‘refutation’ of immaterialism (which was so wide of its target that it gave birth to a class of logical fallacy, the argumentum ad lapidem), modern criticism has tended to miss the fundamental point of Berkeley’s theories. The book makes a convincing case that in doing so, it has underestimated his importance to a generation of writers. The main contention of this book is that Berkeley’s writings provided the philosophical grounds for many of the experiences we now tend to think of as ‘Romantic’, such as intuited knowledge of the spirit, the self, and God. The peculiar appeal of Berkeley to the Romantics lays in the way he provided a means of critiquing Enlightenment ideas using the very tools of the Enlightenment. It was Berkeley’s empirical commitment to the primacy of sense experience that led him to question Locke’s representational theory of knowledge, and with it the claim that, in order to have meaning, a word had to signify a clear and distinct idea. This part of the book’s thesis leans heavily into its (mostly persuasive) ‘literary’ reading of Berkeley, presenting him as a thinker for whom ideation is linguistic and style integral to experience. Berkeley’s writings are self-consciously ‘poetic’, as Townsend maintains in the first chapter, not merely because of the way in which they reflect upon the role played by language in thinking but also because of the way in which they perform that role. Furthermore, Berkeley’s postulation of a category of inferred knowledge based upon ‘notions’ made possible what Townsend calls ‘empiricism spiritualized’, a world in which the senses intuit divine meaning through the ‘ghostly language’ (8) of nature.

Theological Utilitarianism, Supervenience, and Intrinsic Value

Erik Wielenberg has argued that robust realism can account for the “common-sense moral belief” that “some things distinct from God are intrinsically good”. By contrast, theological stateism cannot account for this belief. Hence, robust realism has a theoretical advantage over all forms of theological stateism. This article criticizes Wielenberg’s argument. Wielenberg distinguishes between R and D-supervenience. The coherence of Wielenberg’s robust realism depends upon this distinction. I argue that this distinction undermines his critique of theological stateism. I will make three points. First, once you utilize the distinction between R and D-supervenience, his argument for the incompatibility of theological stateism and intrinsic value fails. Second, theological stateism is compatible with intrinsic value. The historical example of theological utilitarianism, expounded by thinkers George Berkeley and William Paley, shows someone can accept that moral properties simultaneously R supervene upon God’s will and D supervene upon the natural properties of actions. Third, robust realism and theological stateism are in the same boat regarding intrinsic value once we distinguish between R and D-supervenience.

“Political Anatomy” and the Idea of Public Wealth from William Petty to Adam Smith

Inthe article, the author attempts to solve three interrelated problems. First, by offering new readings of key texts authored by leading British thinkers and representatives of different strands of seventeenth-century economic thought, she explores the emergence of the labour theory of value in the intellectual context of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and under the influence of its inspirer, Francis Bacon. Secondly, the author raises the question of the exact form in which the idea of labour as the source and foundation of social wealth, expressed by William Petty, an active critic of the doctrine of mercantilism and one of the founding fathers of English political economy, was initially embodied, as well as the “art of numbers” – quantitative methods of economic and demographic statistics, in his first economic work – “A Treatise on Taxes and Contributions”, published in 1662. Thirdly, the author examines and evaluates the economic ideas and proposals of William Petty and his associates as an integral part of their political views and ideas about “social wealth” and the importance of scientific knowledge for the improvement of public administration. She pays particular attention to the connection between the economic views of William Petty, a major Irish landowner, as set out in “The Political Anatomy of Ireland”, “A Treatise on Ireland,1687”, and other statistical works, and George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, with the assessment of the prospects for the development and future arrangement of Ireland, as well as with proposals for the unification of the two and even all three Kingdoms.

Review: James Hill. The Notions of George Berkeley: Self, Substance, Unity and Power

Review: James Hill. The Notions of George Berkeley: Self, Substance, Unity and Power

Теистическая метафизика «Алкифрона» Джорджа Беркли

The article examines George Berkeley’s philosophy of the 1730s, a period that is seldom analyzed by commentators. The article puts forward two theses. First, in 'Alciphron’ (in particular, in dialogues IV and VII) Berkeley offers a new metaphysics in comparison with immaterialism, which can be described as descriptive, using P.F. Stroson's terminology. Second, in Berkeley's philosophical system, 'Alciphron’ should take the first place — the place of introduction. These theses are supported by analyzing the argument for the existence of the Christian God, presented in the fourth dialogue. The article shows that this argument, which is considered by most researchers only as plausible, can be strengthened by referring to the content of the seventh dialogue. The analysis of the seventh dialogue shows the importance of the so-called natural notions for Berkeley's argumentation in 'Alciphron’. Natural notions are accepted by us without any theoretical justification, they are rooted in human nature. Such natural notions include the concept of accountability. It is connected to many other concepts that characterize our attitude to the actions of free agents (for example, guilt and merit). Our reactions to human actions are similar to reactions to the language of the Creator revealed to us in nature (in the case of God our reaction is praise based on admiration for nature). Natural concepts underlie Berkeley's descriptive metaphysics, the main idea of which is that we cannot but consider phenomena as the result of the actions of free rational agents (finite and infinite). This is justified by a transcendental argument: the condition for the existence of society is belief in natural concepts; society exists and is a natural state for man; therefore, we believe in natural concepts. The use of transcendental argumentation supports the thesis the metaphysics of 'Alciphron' is descriptive.

George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy by Stephen H. Daniel

Reviewed by: George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy by Stephen H. Daniel Peter West Stephen H. Daniel. George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 352. Hardback, $85.00. Stephen H. Daniel’s monograph offers a novel interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophy of mind while situating Berkeley’s thought within the context of early eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics. The text is commendable for its attempt to shed light on Berkeley’s engagement with thinkers and traditions that tend to fall outside the canon of early modern philosophy (such as Stoicism, Ramism, and “noncanonical” thinkers like Jonathan Edwards, Anthony Collins, and Peter Browne) and its attempt to place Berkeley’s lesser-known works, such as De Motu and Siris, on a par with his best-known texts. Daniel’s approach to historical interpretation is strongly contextualist and fits well with recent attempts to read the history of philosophy not as a debate among the “big seven” (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) but as a complicated network of exchanges—often in very localized contexts (such as eighteenth-century Ireland, see chapter 17). Daniel’s aim is to show that Berkeley developed an idiosyncratic account of the mind, which relies on a notion of substance that was not accepted by, and may not have even been familiar to, the likes of Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. Berkeley scholars may already be familiar with this claim. Daniel has previously defended it in various journal publications that are included as chapters in this book (such as chapters 1 and 2, where Daniel argues that Berkeley’s philosophy of mind is more indebted to Stoic and Ramist philosophy than to Cartesian and Lockean thought). It is worth noting that since a defense of this account of Berkeley’s philosophy of mind is Daniel’s focus, and his aims are primarily interpretative rather than expository, the text would be best suited to those with some prior knowledge of Berkeley’s philosophy. In the remainder of this review, I have two aims: first, to explain Daniel’s reading of what Berkeley takes a mind to be, and second, to put forward a criticism of Daniel’s interpretation, focusing on his claim that Berkeley’s notebooks ought to be read in just the same way as his published works. As the appendices to the book indicate (including a series of “Replies to My Critics”), Daniel is aware that his interpretation of Berkeley is not always warmly received. A likely explanation for this is that it is not always easy to understand what a mind is (for Berkeley) if Daniel is right. Daniel tells us this is because we are reading Berkeley in light of the substance-mode ontology of Descartes and Locke (and Aristotle before them) that Berkeley set out to reject (13–16, 294). This is a good reason to simply try to understand how Daniel’s interpretation works. It is tempting to think of the mind as something that has thoughts and ideas, feels emotions, and performs actions like perceiving and reasoning. Our ordinary language reflects this: we say things like “I am tired” or “I am thinking.” Construed in this way, the mind is a thing—in early modern parlance, a substance—that has attributes and acts in certain ways. Similarly, I might describe a tree (another substance) in terms of its properties (tall, solid, brown, etc.) and activities (growing, photosynthesizing, etc.). However, Berkeley thinks this ordinary way of thinking is wrong. Really, he claims, the tree just is a collection of sensible properties (what he calls “ideas”). If Daniel’s interpretation of Berkeley is right, it is also a mistake to think of the mind as a thing behind its thoughts, ideas, perceptions, and emotions. The mind is, as Berkeley puts it in a notebook entry, “a congeries of perceptions” (34). Daniel claims this does not make Berkeley a Humean bundle theorist; [End Page 510] the mind may not be a thing, but it remains a “substance” (in the way the ancient Stoics construed substances [26–36]). The mind is an active principle that translates collections of properties into something meaningful. Because we are minds, we do not...

Questioning Authority: Anthony Collins’ Challenge to Orthodox Anglican Authority Figures and George Berkeley’s Reply

Abstract In this paper I argue that the English freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729) is making use of ‘conglobation’ to develop an argument across the Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710) and the Discourse on Free-Thinking (1713), which aims to challenge the religious authority of orthodox representatives of the Anglican church. That is, Colins makes use of a rhetorical (piecemeal) strategy that serves to insinuate one’s proper position to create, what I will call, the ‘authority-challenge’. I reconstruct this challenge in three steps. First, I analyse Collins’ criticism of William King (1650–1729), the Archbishop of Dublin, who according to Collins’ Vindication advances a conception of the divine attributes and of the nature of God that is compatible with atheism. Second, I introduce Collins’ argument from disagreement, which he develops in his Discourse. This argument aims to establish that whenever there is meaningful disagreement, e. g., about the (philosophical) content and not merely about the best terminology, between the supposed experts, we have the right to think on our own about the issue at hand. In the third step, I present the ‘authority-challenge’. In a nutshell, this challenge requires orthodox representatives of the Anglican church either (i) to open the door to atheism by not substantively disagreeing with William King (thereby undermining everything they stand for and presenting themselves as hypocrites) or (ii) to substantively disagree with King to contain atheism (thereby undermining their status as experts for religious issues). Since (i) cannot be an option, they have no choice but to undermine their own authority by impairing their expert status, which, in turn, has ramifications for their political power as well. In the second part of my paper, I argue that §§ 16–22 of the fourth dialogue of George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732/52) are designed to meet Collins’ ‘authority-challenge’. This will allow me to resolve the puzzle that these sections so far have posed for commentators. In particular, many have been puzzled by Berkeley’s argumentative strategy and in particular his references to the Scholastics. As I argue, however, if §§ 16–22 are read in the light of Collins’ authority challenge, it becomes evident that Berkeley uses these references in his attempt to refute King without failing to meet Collins’ challenge.

Hegel's Logic and Marx's Concept of Capital

Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power is a superb study of the relevance of Hegel's logic to Marx's theory. Hegel is often dismissed by Marxists as an ‘idealist’ denying the reality of the world, as if Hegel were Bishop Berkeley with a German accent.1 Abazari recognizes this is not the case: ‘(T)he logical categories are not self-standing, but shadow, or track, the empirical world’ (Abazari 2020: 7). But the world in its full actuality does not simply consist of the objects we sense or perceive. It is intrinsically intelligible, and its intelligibility can be comprehended only in thought. When it is, the ‘idealist’ thesis of the identity (in difference) of thought and being holds. Anyone asserting a truth claim implicitly asserts this identity. In so far as Marx asserts that Capital comprehends the capitalist mode of production, he too is an ‘idealist’ in the Hegelian sense of the term.

Two hostile bishops? A reexamination of the relationship between Peter Browne and George Berkeley beyond their alleged controversy

ABSTRACT For decades scholars have argued that there was a heated argumentative exchange between the bishop of Cork and Ross, Peter Browne, and the bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley. Thus, they have unduly reduced Browne to a mere adversary of Berkeley. They also thereby distorted the perception of the Irish intellectual milieu in the seventeenth / eighteenth century and the way its participants influenced one another. Contrary to this controversy-reading I establish how ill-supported the prevailing narrative of the relationship between the bishops of Cork and Cloyne is. This, in turn, allows me to demonstrate that the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was embedded in a larger context, which has hitherto been too little appreciated. I will illustrate this point by demonstrating that the two bishops not only reacted to William King's solution to the problem of divine analogy, but that they did so by accepting his ‘resemblance-requirement'. That is, King’s notion that divine representation requires resemblance. This indicates how the discussion about the problem of divine analogy in seventeenth / eighteenth century Ireland was influenced by the way these churchmen thought about the relation of resemblance, representation, and knowledge more generally.

‘Less gross than bodily’: Berkeleian Idealism in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’

This essay offers a reconsideration of the philosophy of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ (1797). While some previous critical accounts have been dismissive of the utility of applying George Berkeley’s thought to the poem, I argue that the poem draws on the part of Berkeley’s philosophy now known as subjective idealism. In A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley posits that all objects are simply collections of ideas, an idea’s existence consisting in its being perceived (‘ esse is percipi’). I contend that when Coleridge imagines Lamb ‘gazing round […] till all doth seem / Less gross than bodily, a living Thing / That acts upon the mind’, he is depicting Lamb as realizing that the world is composed of ideas that emanate from the powerful mind of God. The poem therefore occupies an important transitional point in Coleridge’s intellectual development when he was, briefly, a Berkeleian idealist.

Dualism and Materialism in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts is a contemporary Australian author who had been involved in several criminal activities and was therefore convicted to prison sentence earlier in his life. In 2003, he published the semi-autobiographical novel Shantaram largely based on his experiences in the Indian city of Bombay. The novel, which became a best-seller around the globe is an astounding account of a westerner’s spiritual voyage in the outskirts of India. Shantaram deals with a great many themes and issues such as ethics, violence and good vs. evil, but the theme which lies at the core of the narrative is the binary opposition between dualism and materialism. While dualism defends the autonomy of the mind/soul over the body, materialism affirms that all living beings are bound to material laws. This article aims to analyse Roberts’ Shantaram through the binary opposition of dualism and materialism, and specifically from a dualistic perspective. As the founder of modern philosophy and dualism, René Descartes’ theories will be applied to the text as opposed to the contrasting philosophy of materialism. In this respect, dualism is compared and contrasted with materialism and physicalism with reference to several influential thinkers who contributed to this thought from Greek antiquity to modern philosophy such as Aristotle, Plato, Lucretius, Kant and George Berkeley. Thus, a Cartesian analysis is implemented to Shantaram in order to expose the dualism emphasised in the subtext of Roberts’ narrative. All in all, the study concludes that Shantaram exhibits depictions of Cartesian dualism through the protagonist’s experiences in the slums of Bombay and determines that dualism overcomes materialism in Roberts’ story as the mind/soul asserts its autonomy over the body and its physical sphere.

A Reiding of Berkeley's Theory of Vision

George Berkeley argues that vision is a language of God, that the immediate objects of vision are arbitrary signs for tactile objects and that there is no necessary connection between what we see and what we touch. Thomas Reid, on the other hand, aims to establish a geometrical connection between visible and tactile figures. Consequently, although Reid and Berkeley's theories of vision share important elements, Reid explicitly rejects Berkeley's idea that visible figures are merely arbitrary signs for tangible bodies. But is he right in doing so? I show that many passages in Berkeley's work on vision suggest that he acknowledges a geometrical connection between visibles and tangibles. So the opposition between the arbitrariness Berkeley defends and a geometrical connection cannot be as universal as Reid thinks. This paper seeks to offer a plausible reading of Berkeley's theory of vision in this regard and an explanation of why Reid interprets Berkeley differently.

The aesthetics of the invisible: George Berkeley and the modern aesthetics

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote their widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the (always visible) beautiful and the (mysteriously invisible) sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry.

Loomislugu filosoofias: hr Berkeley vastus Lady Percivalile

The paper discusses George Berkeley’s metaphysical account of the Creation in his work Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713). As we know from Berkeley’s correspondence, his detailed attempt to show that his immaterialist philosophy is compatible with the Mosaic description of the Creation was occasioned by an objection from the wife of his friend Sir John Percival. According to Berkeley’s philosophy, only minds and ideas exist. Physical things such as books and trees are mere collections of ideas in human minds. No thing can exist unless there is a mind to perceive it. Yet the Mosaic story states that many things were created and existed before humans came into being. Lady Percival pointed out that Berkeley’s view makes it hard to understand how things could be created if there were no human beings around to perceive them. In response, Berkeley offered a sophisticated metaphysical construct in which the creation of the physical world is interpreted as God’s decree to produce certain kinds of ideas in potential perceivers. The paper aims to show how Berkeley’s response to Lady Percival’s objection reflects the complicated relationship between philosophy and revealed religion in the early 18th century. Berkeley’s commitment to biblical truth sets significant limits to his philosophical speculation.