Principles Of Human Knowledge Research Articles

Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 1: Homer, Descartes and Pope

AbstractBerkeley is best known for his immaterialism and the texts that extol it—the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. He made his case by treatise, then by dialogue, and this tendency towards stylistic experimentation did not end there; this paper explores an early speculative fiction project that pursued his theological and philosophical agendas. Berkeley used satire to challenge his “freethinking” philosophical opponents in “The Pineal Gland” story published in The Guardian in 1713. Echoing the grand tours Berkeley undertook in subsequent years, Part 1 offers a “gland tour” of some literary motivations, influences and legacies of these essays. Berkeley pursues heroic themes from Homer and Alexander Pope, while lampooning the philosophies of both Descartes and the freethinkers. Armed with the device of a magic snuff that transports him to the pineal glands of his adversaries, Berkeley's protagonist uses it “to distinguish the real from the professed sentiments of all persons of eminence in court, city, town, and country”. (Guardian, p. 187) Part 1 examines ‘The Pineal Gland’ in the context of Berkeley's broader philosophical legacy and the text's significant engagement with the literature of Homer and Pope, concluding that “The Pineal Gland” is an important but overlooked source in the history of early speculative fiction. Part 2 continues this analysis by exploring Berkeley's relationship with an expansive London literary circle, interrogating a line of influence beginning with the writing of Margaret Cavendish. In doing so, Part 2 also examines Berkeley's complex attitudes towards women.

‘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.

From Selfhood to Social Solidarity; From a Mind towards the Collective Thinking and Working Bodies: A Marxist Approach

What our minds and conceive, our bodies can achieve. I will argue that “the mind is not then an autonomous substance, capable of forming its own states without recourse to what lies beyond it: it states arrive by courtesy of a specific external environment.” It means that, our minds appropriates the contents of the material world and this act in turn forms the other contents of our minds and its various categories. Hence, it is not a “surprising thesis that the very constitution of mind is logically bound up with environment. The geography of the mind depends upon actual geography. Undeniably the content of our minds is influenced by society and the world in general, for the former arises because of the existence of the latter.
 This conscious mind, Selfhood must lead to a collective thinking or collective minds that is utterly necessary for the development of the body and this development from further extend to the development of the body politic (Social Solidarity).
 
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A Metaphysical Element in Descartes and the First Cartesians: Non-Univocal Predication

ABSTRACT Descartes’ physics is dependent on his metaphysics, which is to say, on knowledge of the nature of God and of the human soul. This is clear throughout Descartes’ work, but it is especially so in the Principles of Philosophy, where Descartes devotes the first part of the treatise to the Principles of Human Knowledge, including God, the soul, and such common notions as substance (that is, the elements of metaphysics he initially discussed in Discourse on Method Part IV and elaborated in the Meditations). But here it is also possible to see a problem with those foundations. Descartes judges that what is said of substance is not said “univocally” of God and of his creatures. However, the negation of univocal predication is ambiguous as to whether it entails analogical or equivocal predication. Descartes is normally considered as holding for analogy, yet with the evidence for this construal being weak (and the Meditations not being definitive in this respect), I investigate how some of the first Cartesians, Antoine Le Grand and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, among others, interpreted Descartes’ view, to see whether the scales might be tipped in favor of analogy or of equivocation.

A PROBLEM IN DU CHÂTELET’S METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS

Abstract To provide metaphysical grounds for the physics of her time, Du Châtelet argued for the notion of an active force. This was different from the impressed force in Newton’s second law. The former force was a property of a body, whereas the latter was an external cause. I shall study this discrepancy and argue that the interactive concept of force in Newton’s third law is consistent with Du Châtelet’s standards for an intelligible physics. Consequently, the interaction entailed by the law of universal gravitation complies with Du Châtelet’s principles of human knowledge.

La crítica de George Berkeley al representacionalismo de John Locke

En su Tratado sobre los principios del conocimiento humano, George Berkeley ofrece una serie de argumentos cuyo objetivo es criticar la tesis materialista. Mi propósito en este artículo es reconstruir y analizar en detalle estos argumentos. Dado que la crítica de Berkeley al materialismo es, fundamentalmente, una crítica al materialismo representacionalista de John Locke, empezaré este artículo explicando cuáles son las ideas básicas de la propuesta de Locke.

Is Shepherd's pen mightier than Berkeley's word?

ABSTRACTIn 1827, Lady Mary Shepherd published Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, which offers both an argument for the existence of a world of external bodies existing outside our minds and a criticism of Berkeley's argument for idealism in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. In this paper, I evaluate Margaret Atherton's criticisms of Shepherd's case against Berkeley, and provide reasons for thinking that, although Shepherd's particular criticisms of Berkeley do not succeed, she correctly identifies an important problem to which Berkeley's reasoning is subject.

JOSEPH BLAU AWARD: Mind and Matter in Early America: The Berkeley-Johnson Correspondence

in response to william james’s assertion that he developed American pragmatism, C. S. Peirce remarked that “Berkeley on the whole has more right to be considered the introducer of pragmatism into philosophy than any other man, though I was more explicit in enunciating it.”1 If Edwards is sometimes taken to be America’s first metaphysician, and Franklin to be the founder of an American trajectory of practical action, this paper will instead examine how we might rethink Berkeley’s immaterialism within both the tangled skein of questions of matter and mind in transatlantic and early American thought and, per Peirce’s assertion, as offering another trajectory in American thought. I will do so by exploring how Berkeley’s philosophy came to North America and in turn influenced the eighteenth-century American theologian/philosopher Samuel Johnson. Their subsequent correspondence provides a rich archive of philosophical speculation concerning the status of matter, perception, noetics, and causality. By the time George Berkeley was 25, he had already published two major works, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). These, with his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), established Berkeley’s complex and often contested philosophical position of “immaterialism.” The confusion elicited by Berkeley’s immaterialism has often been the result of superficial interpretations of his famous phrase esse est percipi exacerbated by the many Berkeleian witticisms that dot his work, of the nature “God is my witness that I was, and still do remain, entirely persuaded of the non-existence of matter”(Gaustad 58). Yet, it is not exactly precise to say that Berkeley denied the existence of matter, as to say that, for Berkeley, there are no mind-independent material things. In his Dialogues, he makes this clear: “Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things

Análisis del argumento de Berkeley para probar la existencia de Dios (Tratado sobre los principios del conocimiento humano I, §29)

En este ensayo analizaremos el argumento que usa Berkeley para probar la existencia de Dios en el Tratado sobre los principios del conocimiento humano I, §29. Veremos cuál es la estructura del argumento, la justificación que ofrece Berkeley de sus premisas y expondremos los que creemos son los principales problemas del argumento. A partir de nuestro análisis, llegaremos a la conclusión de que el argumento es dialécticamente inútil, en tanto que sus premisas no están justificadas.

Just Communicating

Just Communicating

Berkeleys Idealismus

Abstract. According to a widespread interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophy, advocated, for example, by Kant and Reid, Berkeley’s main claim in the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is that there are no material, but only mental entities. In the following essay, it is argued that this reading of Berkeley’s idealism is mistaken. Berkeley does not hold ontological idealism, that is, the view that there is not a material world, to be true, but only counterfactual idealism, that is, the claim that material entities counterfactually depend upon mental substances for their existence. While defending this interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophy, I examine in some detail his theory of ideas and his account of corporeal substances. I conclude by discussing several objections to the reading of Berkeley’s idealism advanced in this essay.

The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment by Costica Bradatan

232 can be a dense tangle of assertion and rebuttal. Especially appealing is the simultaneous attentiveness to literary and philosophical topics, for example, Mr. Cope’s insight about ‘‘Woolston’s commitment to eighteenth-century literarycritical and aesthetic ideals’’ and Mr. Venturo’s framework of the beast fable for understanding Bridoul’s School. A gentle chide: Mr. Cope opposes an ‘‘acute concern for identity issues found in gender studies’’ to the study of Augustan religion in the Preface. Certainly it is the case that much study of gender has overlooked the importance of religion , but we also cannot ignore the work that has been done—and needs to continue—on gender and or within religious writings. It is arguable, for example , that an interest in women writers such as Mary Astell has increased our collective knowledge of eighteenth-century religion. A full understanding of the rhetorical tactics deployed in these debates would involve some study of the subtle role of gender. Notwithstanding this minor point, this collection is excellent . Laura M. Stevens University of Tulsa COSTICA BRADATAN. The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment . New York: Fordham, 2006. Pp. x ⫹ 227. $55. The George Berkeley whom we have all grown to know and love in histories of philosophy is a critic of abstractions who ridicules believers in the mystical existence of things beyond our perception . He insists that common sense requires that we limit our claims to what we actually see, and that means thinking of things in the world simply in terms of regular patterns in what we experience . Of course, we experience only our ideas, but that in no way threatens our ability to say that we daily confront the real world. His New Theory of Vision (1709) and Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) are thus reminders of just how solidly he is a man whose feet are firmly on the ground. But then there are Berkeley’s other, troubling works—writings that embarrass hardcore commentators as much as Newton’s fascination with numerology and alchemy. Berkeley’s fixation on nature as a language, his invocation of Neoplatonic and hermetic sources, and his insistence on tar water as a panacea that links all things physical and spiritual seem to have little connection to the enchanting clarity of his early insights. In spending so much time thinking about vision and the intricacies of knowledge, Berkeley seems a visionary himself, swept up in the gnosis of idealism and carried off by a longing for a paradise not of this world (except perhaps in Bermuda). Mr. Bradatan draws our attention to this other Bishop Berkeley. The Bishop ’s attempt to establish a college in America and his later writings— especially Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744)—are made intelligible by contextualizing them in utopian thinking, Christian apologetics, and Platonism. Steeped in the tradition of Plato, Hermes Trismegistos, Plotinus, and Ficino, this reenchanted Berkeley finds the key for the elixir of life and moral salvation in doctrines that portray all things as expressions in the book of nature and links in the great chain of being. Even the early Berkeley invokes such themes when he describes how divine archetypes are models for human knowledge. But in the current account, the Principles and the Dialogues between Hylas 233 and Philonous (1713) are overshadowed by the ‘‘unavoidable’’ triumph in Siris of esoteric wisdom, the Christian ‘‘mystical alchemy’’ of tar water, and the Neoplatonic subordination of matter. Berkeley is considered in contexts with which he is seldom associated. Chapters highlight his subversive literary procedures and rhetorical techniques , the resonance of his visuallanguage doctrine with the medieval tradition of the Book of the World, the alchemical background of Siris, the role of Christian apologetics in Alciphron, the eschatological and utopian character of Berkeley’s Bermuda project, and (most puzzlingly) how the Cathar characterization of matter as the source of evil helps in explaining Berkeley’s immaterialism . It is this last theme that raises questions about the underlying assumptions of the whole book, because unlike the Cathars, Berkeley does not think of matter and the natural world as the source of evil. Rather, for Berkeley, thinking that matter exists apart from what we perceive is the source of...

X-Berkeley, the Ends of Language, and thePrinciples of Human Knowledge

This paper discusses some key connections between Berkeley's reflections on language in the introduction to his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge and the doctrines espoused in the body of that work, in particular his views on vulgar causal discourse and his response to the objection that his metaphysics imputes massive error to ordinary thought. I argue also that there is some mileage in the view that Berkeley's thought might be an early form of non-cognitivism.

Causalidade e representação em Berkeley: os dados imediatos da subjetividade

O objetivo deste artigo é examinar a relação entre ser e perceber a partir da análise do princípio central da filosofia de George Berkeley - esse est percipi -, conforme é apresentado na obra A treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge (1710). Para desenvolver essa análise e seguindo o tratamento dado por Grayling à fundamentação desse princípio, pretendemos mostrar que os argumentos de Berkeley se dispõem em três níveis: o estritamente empírico (sense data); o fenômenico (mundo da experiência ordinária); e o metafísico que, em última instânci, explica os dois anteriores.

A new account of Berkeley's likeness principle

In the opening sections of the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley contends that sensible objects, those things that are or are capable of being sensed, are ideas which cannot exist apart from ...

Review: Berkeley and the Principles of Human Knowledge

1Department of Philosophy, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK Berkeley and the Principles of Human Knowledge Robert J. Fogelin London Routledge 2001 x + 166 Paperback£8.99

Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel

Introduction: dialogue and Enlightenment Part I. Strains of Enlightenment: 1. Shaftesbury's characteristic genres: concepts of criticism in the early eighteenth century 2. Shaftesbury's The Moralists: a dialogue upon dialogue 3. Berkeley and the paradoxes of empiricism: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous 4. Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Christian Cicero 5. Hume and the end of religious dialogue: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion Part II. Dialogue, Aesthetics and the Novel: 6. The Platonic revival: 1740-70 7. Anti-Platonism and the novelistic character 8. Dead conversations: Richard Hurd's late poetics of dialogue 9. Utopia or conversation: transforming dialogue in Johnson and Austen Epilogue: some dialectics of Enlightenment.

Dating Adam Smith's Essay "Of the External Senses"

According to the received view, Adam Smith's essay the External Senses was written sometime before 1752. The evidence for this claim comes from the fact that this essay argues for a distinction between primary and secondary qualities of material objects, a distinction which was denied by Berkeley in his Principles ofHuman Knowledge (1710). However, Smith did commend Berkeley's Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), thus the presumption is that Smith maintained the primacy of solidity, extension, etc. only because he was not familiar with Berkeley's later argument. It is therefore probable that he wrote the essay before digesting Hume's Treatise (1739) or even before becoming closely acquainted with Hume, as there is reason to believe he did before 1752 (Stewart, 1.13).'1 Of course this line of reasoning hinges upon the idea that Smith would have agreed with Hume's and Berkeley's analyses of the sensory origin of knowledge, but this assumption must be questioned simply because it is certain that the essay was written during or after the year 1758, a late enough date that we can reasonably assume that Smith was well aware of Berkeley's idealist argument against the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of bodies, either directly or via Hume. The evidence for this lower bound of 1758 comes from the essay itself, particularly Smith's various references to Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.2 As is well known, the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus was the first naturalist successfully to organize all the known plants and animals into their class, order, genus, and species, although the English naturalists John Ray and Francis Willughby had undertaken the same task a half-century earlier. This

Particles and ideas: Bishop Berkeley's corpuscularian philosophy

Introduction. Part 1: Corpuscularianism and inductivism in the Principles of human knowledge and Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Part 2 Siris (I) - particles as theoretical entities assumed in hypotheses: including the Bishop's aether and Newton's hypothesis of aether in Opticks, the anti-Cartesian trend and Berkeley's defence of empty space. Part 3: Siris (II) - particles as undoubtedly real. Part 4: Siris (III) - particles as of old. Appendices: 1 - Berkeley's early atomism as expounded in his theory of Minima 2 - did Popper misunderstand Berkeley? 3 - the corpuscularian index of Siris 4 - index of references to Minima in the Philosophical commentaries 5 - the Minima-theory and the corpuscularian theories in Siris. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Berkeley and the Justification of Beliefs

Berkeley wants to say something about scepticism and the 'principles of human knowledge' in his main works, as if he were an epistemologist by inclination. When one reads the actual texts this opinion may well change: not much is said about knowledge and belief. However, the problems of evidence and epistemic justification are considered, mainly in connection with the problems of the external world. What is matter and whether we have any contact with spatiotemporal bodies are the problems which drove Berkeley to write his Principles and Three Dialogues.' My purpose is to focus on such epistemic issues as the justification of our beliefs concerning the various types of entities in Berkeley's philosophical universe. I suggest that we explicate 'knowledge' according to the so called 'classical definition' and pay attention to the possibility of belief formation concerning different types of epistemic objects. The 'classical definition of knowledge' is this: Knowledge is true and justified belief. The problem of belief formation is here understood, firstly, to be roughly the question of whether any such belief that qualifies as both true and justified/certain can also be formed in one's mind. It is the question about a reliable connection between the mind and the world. Sec-