Idea Of Things Research Articles

Digitalization, communication and consumer culture

Introduction. The main idea of the article is the transformation of communication processes and consumer culture in the process of digitalization.Purpose setting. A special place is occupied by the problems of communication innovations, the cultural dynamics of prosumerism, as well as the communication strategies used by manufacturers. The key aspect of this discourse is full digitalization of society and its infiltration in the different spheres of human life.Methodology and methods of the study. The article substantiates the position that not only the technological factor affects the system of consumer views, but the philosophy of consumption is undergoing transformation along with changing patterns of consumption in society.Results. Modern communications and community values have played an equally significant role in the formation of a new market for goods and services.Conclusions. Modern communications influence on society, revealing a completely new type of consumer with new forms of attitude and idea of things and values, which affect the representation of goods and services on the market.

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

<i>Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel</i>. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.

Public Reason and Embodied Community- Intercultural Philosophical Perspective: An African Approach

Every human person is a cultural being. Each culture has incomplete knowledge of reality, and the sharing of viewpoints makes for mutual enrichment, hence the need for intercultural perspectives. Even in a human being, body and spirit, emotion and reason reciprocally influence on each other. Life is dialogical. Action gives flesh to theory, and the abstract reason is exemplified in real things, which is what embodiment of reason is all about. Principles govern all things and public reason, as a causal principle, regulates the affairs of embodied homogeneous communities. African embodiment of reason is self-evident in names and allegories wherein rational thoughts and ideas are personified the way sentient robots embody or personify Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this treatise, we shall use allegory, nomenclature, traditional songs, apophthegms, etc., to show how Africans wisely incarnate ideas in things. As it is analogous to modern-day AI, we shall not only highlight the African approach to public reason and embodied community but also tangentially discuss the effect of AI on the global community, of which Africa is a subunit. In conclusion, we shall caution against the empowering of robots with logical reasoning, and the disempowering and denaturalizing of humans.&#x0D; Keywords: Reason, Embodiment, Philosophy, Principle and Community.

Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood

Reviewed by: Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood John O. Jordan Elaine Freedgood. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton UP, 2019. Pp. xxii + 152. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-19330-4. The 19th-century realist novel, it seems, has ragged edges that open up onto a multitude of alternate universes. Or so Elaine Freedgood argues in her provocative and important new book on Victorian fiction. These alternate universes – "worlds enough," as the title of her book calls them – are not exactly the stuff of science fiction. Rather, they are the result of ruptures in the supposedly coherent and stable narrative surface that many readers and critics have for at least the past half century taken for granted as the normative and dominant form of the 19th-century English novel. "Realism," Freedgood contends, is a critical construct, invented by late 20th-century critics in order to sustain a literary history that views the novels of George Eliot and her contemporaries as "the point of representational plenitude to which early novels aspire and the point of representational exhaustion from which modernist and postmodernist novels flee" (xii). In constructing this history, its proponents have overlooked the many ways in which Victorian novels interrupt and subvert central conventions of "realistic" representation: denotation, omniscience, diegetic consistency, and ontological unity. The Victorian novel, she maintains, is always already metafictional. In her influential earlier study, The Ideas in Things (2006), Freedgood struck out in this direction, but without overtly challenging the assumptions of "classical realism." In The Ideas in Things, she adopted a "literalist" approach ("strong metonymy," she also called it) in order to explore the material history of "things" like mahogany furniture and calico curtains, before bringing those histories and their accumulated meanings back into the Victorian novels where such things figure. In Worlds Enough, she tackles Realism head on. Her key trope here is metalepsis, which she defines (following Genette) as the intrusion of one diegetic or ontological level into another. Where other critics ignore or fail to notice these intrusions, or treat them as flaws and inconsistencies in a novel's diegesis, Freedgood finds them everywhere and delights in the instabilities they produce. She locates these ruptures and intrusions at points where the boundary between what is "inside" and what is "outside" a text begins to blur. They emerge in literary allusions; in epigraphs, footnotes, and other paratexts; in the presence of actual historical persons inside works of fiction; in authorial intrusions; in slippages between third- and first-person narration; and in the simultaneous presence of incompatible geographies. She notes the prevalence of ghosts in supposedly realistic stories and asks, did Victorians [End Page 198] "believe"? do we? These and other destabilizing formal elements cause the purportedly coherent story world of Victorian fiction to splinter, she says, into "a seemingly infinite number of worlds" (xiii). Despite the ultimate seriousness of the arguments it makes, Worlds Enough often adopts a playful, teasing tone toward its subject and toward the critics with whom it disagrees, including some major figures (J. Hillis Miller, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti, for example) who might be surprised to find themselves positioned as they are. Readily acknowledging that her account is incomplete and provisional, Freedgood nevertheless aims to help critics "unthink novel history and restore the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel, putting aside 'classical realism' in favor of a novel full of self-reflexivity and formal hijinks" (x). Worlds Enough consists of a preface that summarizes Freedgood's argument, a short historical and theoretical introduction, and five "case studies" that demonstrate the workings of metalepsis in selected Victorian novels by, among others, Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. It concludes with a chapter entitled "Decolonizing the Novel," in which she expands her argument to include ways in which some critics have, she believes, imposed an "imperial" model on the relationship between the Victorian novel and works of non-Western fiction. The five case studies deal, respectively, with questions of denotation; with omniscience and its discontents; with the uncertain status of paratexts; with what Freedgood self-mockingly calls "hetero-ontologicality"; and with the vagaries of reference in several Victorian...

CONSUMPTION AS A SOCIAL PHENOMENON

Formulation of the problem. In the processes of socio-cultural dynamics of modern society, a significant role is played by the consumption process, which is not only a marker of the development of society because it creates new semantic connections and forms a symbolic continuum of social relations, but also significantly influences the processes of personality socialization and formation of social practices. Moreover, just the discourse of consumption that creates and represents patterns of behavior, shapes values and norms that make up the socio-cultural aspect of the late-20th-the beginning of the 21st century, which they call “consumption society”. Consumerism is the ideology of “consumption society” is the dependence of the level of personal happiness and enjoyment on the value and prestige of things, that are consumed. In sociological discourse, consumption is interpreted as the conscious activity of people to construct their own identity through consumption.Analysis of recent research and publications. Consumption as a phenomenon and society of consumption as a new image of society during a long period of time has been on the focus of Western researchers, especially economists, sociologists, philosophers, the most illustrative are the works of K. Marks, M. Weber, T. Veblen (consumption is interpreted as a process of socio-economic stratification), J. Baudrillard, G. Marcuse (consumption as a symbolic exchange), P. Bourdieu (field of consumption as a lifestyle), E. Giddens (consumption as a process of identity construction), N. McCendrick, J. Brewer, J. G. Plumb, etc., among Ukrainian researchers, these issues are studied by O. Gerus, A. Doroshkevich, N. Zinchenko, O. Serdyuk.Formation of goals. The purpose of the article is to reveal the essence of the phenomenon of consumption and consumer practices, to reveal their influence on the processes of socio-cultural dynamics of modern society.Presentation of the main material. The concept of “consumption” has become on the focus of attention of intellectuals in connection with the philosophy of “consumption society”, which was developed by J. Baudrillard as a result of rethinking K. Marx’s theory of political economy and its replacement with the theory of symbolic objects. J. Baudrillard interprets consumer society as a practical reality that contains a “mythological dimension” in its own “objective” definition.J. Baudrillard proves that consumption is not reduced to satisfaction of needs, but encourages their production, turns into an “active mode of relation” to objective reality. Beyond consumption, it is impossible to explain human behavior. Not only goods and services are consumed, but the whole system of objects as a symbolic structure, whereby the need becomes a structural mode of productivity, and the product is reduced to values-signs, not things, but ideas of things are consumed.The specificity of the consumption process is conditioned by the influence of purposeful pressure of economic levers and the system of value determinants, which are constructed within a certain society, mainly through the media space, as well as by the fact that the objects of consumption are not material but socio-cultural objects. Significant importance is attached to the peculiarities of consumer behavior and reproduction of their consumption practices, because it is through consumption that person realizes and asserts.Conclusions. Consumption in the processes of social dynamics and social transformation becomes functional, significantly influencing the status position of the individual in the structure of social relations. It is a means of social reproduction and a marker of the individual’s position in the social hierarchy system. Through advertising and fashion, individual consumes a set of certain images and lifestyles, values and patterns, which then he reproduces in everyday practice, in communication, in social interactions. Consumption of certain goods, services is important for self-identification and self-affirmation of the individual.

Heidegger’s Thing and the Problems of Their Representation

사물론은 본질에서 인식의 주체가 세계와 맺는 관계에서 발생하는 문제점을 고찰하는 데서 출발한다. 이 글은 하이데거의 사물론을 분석하고, 그의 사유가 현대 사물론에 미치는 영향을 설명하면서 우리와 세계와의 관계가 사물에 의존하는 방식을 검토하려 한다. 이 글에서 주체와 대상관계에 속박된 재현의 한계를 강조하는 것은 사물이 이러한 이분법에 선재하며, 주체와 대상관계로 담아낼 수 없는 자체의 충만함을 가지며 인간의 인식에서 물러나는 성격을 지닌다는 점을 제시하기 위함이다. 사물의 사물성은 드러나지 않은 것이 드러난 것을 결정하며, 드러난 것은 드러나지 않은 것에서 도출된 이차적인 면이라는 논지를 따른다. 사물의 사물성은 간접적으로, 각도를 가지고 접근할 수밖에 없으며, 이러한 관점에서 하이데거의 비유 (대지, 무), 비유체계(사역의 관계로 사물의 드러남/감춤을 설명), 기분, 공조를 설명할 수 있다. 사물의 사물성을 설명하기 위해, 하이데거는 메타포의 비대칭성을 사용하거나 비개념적으로 실재에 접근하는 방식을 택한다. 사물은 고정할 수 없으며, 인간을 비롯한 다른 요소들과 통합적 관계를 맺으면서 함께 세계를 구성하지만, 인간의 지시 관계와 목적에 한정되지 않는 독립성을 지니며, 각자 사물로서 개시하는 방식이 다르며, 개시의 시점과 시기도 다르며 항상 개시하는 것은 아니다.Things point to the problems of our relations to the world as perceiving subjects. This paper concerns itself with discussing Heidegger’s idea of things and its influence over contemporary thing theories to figure out how things condition the way we’re related to our environment. It begins with discussing Heidegger’s attack on the limits of the binary of the subject and the object, suggesting that things are prior to and work beyond these limits by dint of their intrinsic fullness, withdrawing from human cognition. The logic of the thingness of things follows the invisible conditions the visible and the visible is a derivative of the invisible. Thus, it is necessary for us to approach the problems of the thingly things indirectly or at angle. One corollary of this is Heidegger use of the metaphor of the Earth and nothingness, of the metaphorical system of the four-folds, which explains the (un)concealment of the thing in the dynamic negotiations of the four constituents, and of mood and attunement. Heidegger favors, so to speak, either the metaphorical dissymmetry or the non-conceptual approach to the real. The thing is that which can’t be finalized once and for all and works with other participants holistically in an environment; nevertheless, it maintains its nonnarrative fullness and self-sufficiency beyond human relevance and purposes. Things thing in their own ways, from time to time.

Real Domesticity

Real Domesticity

Bazaars and Found Objects: Thing Culture in Post-war Poland

Because of the specific political and economic situation, in the period immediately after World War II Poland was characterized by a low standard of living, difficulties in obtaining supplies of basic products, limited opportunities to travel abroad and the arrival of foreign aid packages which fueled consumer desires. This paper explores how clothes were used and valued at a time of shortage, and particularly the way that the bazaar was seen as “a seedbed of fashion and elegance.” This research explores the Polish bazaars as a manifestation of Elaine Freedgood’s concept of “thing culture,” contrasted with “commodity culture” in her The Ideas in Things (2006). Using three different examples from diverse parts of post-war Poland, the paper explores how people experienced the “thingness” of clothes in a period of extreme hardship. Even in times of austerity, clothes were much more than simple commodities.

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott De Witt Douglas Kilgore (bio) During the past two decades Kevin Willmott has occupied a unique place in independent filmmaking, as an African American writer and director. His work is guided by the idea that cinema can inform as well as entertain, illuminating our world in ways that are both unexpected and pleasurable. He believes that filmmaking can do good by allowing us to remember what we may have forgotten, changing how we see the world, and making it a better place in which to live. As a maker of independent feature films Willmott’s approach is to use familiar film genres such as the western, comedy, science fiction, and the sports film to tell stories driven by the perspectives and experiences of African and Native Americans. Thus he has created a body of work that establishes a space in which American visual culture is diverted from its persistent emphasis on celebrating the political and social investments of deracinated white men. Films such as The Battle for Bunker Hill (2008), The Only Good Indian (2009), Destination Planet Negro (2013), and his best-known work, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), demonstrate both his range and his commitment to reclaiming American history through the actions and voices of its minority actors using the traditional storytelling strategies of mainstream cinema. This interview took place following the 2013 retrospective “An African American Independent: The Films of Kevin Willmott,” presented by the Black Film Center/Archive and the Indiana University Cinema. In it, the film-maker discusses the nature of his work and why it emerges from locations and commitments largely foreign to Hollywood. Removing himself from the film industry’s institutional constraints has freed him to nurture an alternative supported by his residence in Kansas as a film professor and his history as a native of the state. As a result, his films may be seen as the cinematic equivalent of a regional theater, using local artistic and technical resources [End Page 95] to create stories that reflect perspectives and experiences immediate to the people of his state. Willmott sees his regional aesthetic as part of an active conversation about race and history with his colleagues. This exchange prioritizes the challenge of creating feature films that can attract audiences poorly served by more orthodox motion pictures. An additional challenge, Willmott notes, is both seeking and creating those audiences. That has meant making movies that mount serious engagements with the pattern and texture of black lives within the conventions that mainstream filmmaking have made both familiar and pleasurable. It is a strategy that leverages the popular forms American filmgoers share and makes them fit containers for the actualities of American political and social life. The experiences recalled and the lessons learned are thereby made attractive and, possibly, more effective than the straightforward social problem or message film. Thus Willmott’s broader ambition is to make the conversations about race that are a part of his production process an entertaining element of what an audience will enjoy. Since this interview was conducted, Willmott has released Jayhawkers (2013), a sports drama focused on the University of Kansas men’s basketball team in the civil rights era, and Chi-raq (2015), a Chicago-based comedy, co-written with Spike Lee, that uses Aristophanes’s Lysistrata to mount an incisive critique of American gun violence. De Witt Douglas Kilgore: Most of your films use Kansas, its physical and visual presence and its history, as a place worthy of interest. Could you tell us about why you decided that Los Angeles or New York wasn’t the best venue for your work? Kevin Willmott: For me it was a question of productivity. I think that a large part of the decision to go the path I chose was based on my vision; whether my idea of things would ever become real in motion pictures. It didn’t seem to me like it would, and you know one thing I really kind of believe in a lot is that you have to at some point in your life figure out: “OK, so if I’m...

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott

On Practicing an Independent African American Cinema: An Interview with Kevin Willmott De Witt Douglas Kilgore (bio) During the past two decades Kevin Willmott has occupied a unique place in independent filmmaking, as an African American writer and director. His work is guided by the idea that cinema can inform as well as entertain, illuminating our world in ways that are both unexpected and pleasurable. He believes that filmmaking can do good by allowing us to remember what we may have forgotten, changing how we see the world, and making it a better place in which to live. As a maker of independent feature films Willmott’s approach is to use familiar film genres such as the western, comedy, science fiction, and the sports film to tell stories driven by the perspectives and experiences of African and Native Americans. Thus he has created a body of work that establishes a space in which American visual culture is diverted from its persistent emphasis on celebrating the political and social investments of deracinated white men. Films such as The Battle for Bunker Hill (2008), The Only Good Indian (2009), Destination Planet Negro (2013), and his best-known work, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), demonstrate both his range and his commitment to reclaiming American history through the actions and voices of its minority actors using the traditional storytelling strategies of mainstream cinema. This interview took place following the 2013 retrospective “An African American Independent: The Films of Kevin Willmott,” presented by the Black Film Center/Archive and the Indiana University Cinema. In it, the film-maker discusses the nature of his work and why it emerges from locations and commitments largely foreign to Hollywood. Removing himself from the film industry’s institutional constraints has freed him to nurture an alternative supported by his residence in Kansas as a film professor and his history as a native of the state. As a result, his films may be seen as the cinematic equivalent of a regional theater, using local artistic and technical resources [End Page 95] to create stories that reflect perspectives and experiences immediate to the people of his state. Willmott sees his regional aesthetic as part of an active conversation about race and history with his colleagues. This exchange prioritizes the challenge of creating feature films that can attract audiences poorly served by more orthodox motion pictures. An additional challenge, Willmott notes, is both seeking and creating those audiences. That has meant making movies that mount serious engagements with the pattern and texture of black lives within the conventions that mainstream filmmaking have made both familiar and pleasurable. It is a strategy that leverages the popular forms American filmgoers share and makes them fit containers for the actualities of American political and social life. The experiences recalled and the lessons learned are thereby made attractive and, possibly, more effective than the straightforward social problem or message film. Thus Willmott’s broader ambition is to make the conversations about race that are a part of his production process an entertaining element of what an audience will enjoy. Since this interview was conducted, Willmott has released Jayhawkers (2013), a sports drama focused on the University of Kansas men’s basketball team in the civil rights era, and Chi-raq (2015), a Chicago-based comedy, co-written with Spike Lee, that uses Aristophanes’s Lysistrata to mount an incisive critique of American gun violence. De Witt Douglas Kilgore: Most of your films use Kansas, its physical and visual presence and its history, as a place worthy of interest. Could you tell us about why you decided that Los Angeles or New York wasn’t the best venue for your work? Kevin Willmott: For me it was a question of productivity. I think that a large part of the decision to go the path I chose was based on my vision; whether my idea of things would ever become real in motion pictures. It didn’t seem to me like it would, and you know one thing I really kind of believe in a lot is that you have to at some point in your life figure out: “OK, so if I’m...

THE CONFLICT OF LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY

The term “liberal democracy” hides the conflict of two different philosophies. Liberal metaphysics is based on the idea of thing, while democracy is based on the idea of action and process. Democratic process does not have any core of ideas, which is typical of liberalism. The goal of liberal political philosophy is to circumscribe political power. The aim of democracy is the creation of self-government of the citizens. Liberals do not see many things that are important to democrats: common good, community, nation, history and cultural identity. It is possible to speak about fundamental conflict between liberal individualism and general will of democracy. In discussions about democracy there is always at least some confusion about the role of liberalism and democracy. Contemporary theoreticians of democracy do not want to admit that the drawbacks of liberal political philosophy necessarily become the weaknesses of democracy. This is the price we have to pay for the fusion of liberalism and democracy. The drawing of demarcation lines between the spheres of influence of democracy and liberalism today is the main goal of the theory of democracy.

Idea rzeczy i idee w rzeczach

We fragmencie wstępu do książki "A Sense of Things" Bill Brown problematyzuje relację powierzchni i głębi przedmiotów w amerykańskiej poezji modernistycznej. Brown wychodząc od sentencji Williama Carlosa Williamsa - No ideas but in things - rozważa teoretyczną możliwość istnienia idei w rzeczach (zamiast idei rzeczy). Odwołując się do poezji Williamsa, ale też fotografii Stranda, tekstów Benjamina i Baudelaira (w obu przypadkach poświęconych doświadczeniu dzieci) przedstawia propozycję myślenia rzeczami, a jednocześnie stawia pytania o współczesne społeczne formy relacji ludzi i rzeczy.

Fragmentary Landscapes: Revealing Seismicity in the Imagining of Southern California

This paper introduces ‘Terra Incognita’, a contemporary photographic practice located in the relationship between photography, seismology and the visual representation of landscape in Southern California. Photography and geological science have been used together since the late nineteenth century to document this region, and Terra Incognita can be situated within this visual culture of using photography in the representation of scientific knowledge, in particular to extend the threshold of visual perception. Concepts borrowed from archaeology provided a framework for the Terra Incognita practice, and also (together with discourses on Southern California, photography itself and seismology) for constructing meaning in the photographs. The seismic activity caused by the extensive fault zone which exists in this region is immense, with the topography moving at a rate of about five centimetres every year. Southern California, through sitting precariously on the edge of the North American continent, challenges thinking about how any landscape can ever be known. It has been described in terms such as ‘utopia’ and ‘sunshine’, but also in the same breath as ‘dystopia’ and ‘noir’, and the idea of things being in flux or unsettled has been central to creating an identity of place. The paper concludes that within the limits of the photographic medium, of human perception and of seismic prediction, ‘fragmentary views’ become the only way to know this ‘unknow-able’ landscape.

Strengthening Families: Nurturing and Attachment

While nurturing comes naturally for many parents, it can be helpful to think about the concrete ways in which parents can strengthen their bonds with their children. This 3-page fact sheet offers some ideas of things that you can do to help foster nurturing and attachment between you and your child. Written by David C. Diehl, Jessica N. Wente, and Larry F. Forthun, and published by the UF Department of Family Youth and Community Sciences, December 2011.

Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp 184. $29.00 (cloth).

Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp 184. $29.00 (cloth).

Midsummer magic

June 21 marks the longest day of the year – midsummer's day. Angela Youngman shares some ideas of things to do with children on this theme

The ideas in things: fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel

The ideas in things: fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel

The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, by Elaine Freedgood

<i>The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel</i>, by Elaine Freedgood

Multi‐dimensional phenotyping: towards a new taxonomy for airway disease

All the real knowledge which we possess, depends on methods by which we distinguish the similar from the dissimilar. The greater the number of natural distinctions this method comprehends the clearer becomes our idea of things. The more numerous the objects which employ our attention the more difficult it becomes to form such a method and the more necessary. Classification is a fundamental part of medicine. Diseases are often categorized according to pre-20th century descriptions and concepts of disease based on symptoms, signs and functional abnormalities rather than on underlying pathogenesis. Where the aetiology of disease has been revealed (for example in the infectious diseases) a more precise classification has become possible, but in the chronic inflammatory diseases, and in the inflammatory airway diseases in particular, where pathogenesis has been stubbornly difficult to elucidate, we still use broad descriptive terms such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which defy precise definition because they encompass a wide spectrum of presentations and physiological and cellular abnormalities. It is our contention that these broad-brush terms have outlived their usefulness and that we should be looking to create a new taxonomy of airway disease-a taxonomy that more closely reflects the spectrum of phenotypes that are encompassed within the term airway inflammatory diseases, and that gives full recognition to late 20th and 21st century insights into the disordered physiology and cell biology that characterizes these conditions in the expectation that these will map more closely to both aetiology and response to treatment. Development of this taxonomy will require a much more complete and sophisticated correlation of the many variables that make up a condition than has been usual to employ in an approach that encompasses multi-dimensional phenotyping and uses complex statistical tools such as cluster analysis.

THE RAMIST CONTEXT OF BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHY

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