1. Modern Philosophy PHIL320
Berkeley – Principles 1
Charles Manekin
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

2. Modern Philosophy PHIL320
Topics of Discussion
Objections to Immaterialism
The Religious Significance of the Doctrine.
Arguments against Absolute Time and Space
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

3. Objections and Replies
How can we distinguish between dreaming or imagining and sensing?
Sensing is not dependent upon my will.
Vividness of perception in sensing
Haven’t you eliminated the real world?
No, I have eliminated matter.
Isn’t real fire different from imagined fire?
Isn’t real pain different from imagined pain?
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

4. Objections and Replies
We see things at a difference?
Strictly speaking, we do not observe distance.
Things are constantly popping in and out of existence.
What about colors, and what’s wrong with continual creation?
What about the perceiver who neither slumbers nor sleeps?
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

5. Objections and Replies
If figure and extension exist in the mind, doesn’t that make the mind shaped?
Nah!
What about the new mechanical theories of corpuscular motion?
Are atoms observable?
But we say that fire causes heat
We also say that the sun rises.
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

6. Berkeley as the Ally of Common Sense
Philosophy gets people into trouble, and a misuse of language gets philosophy into trouble.
Demonstration of the immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul.
Deep religious overtones of the philosophy
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

7. The Attack on Abstract Ideas
The Lockean Explanation of the Process of Abstraction
“Does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle...for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once. In effect it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some part of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together.
Berkeley -- Ideas are general, not abstract
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

8. The Attack on Abstract Ideas
The Medieval Background of all this
The problem is one of language, and the idea that general nouns name abstract ideas.
..."Whereas in truth there is no such thing as one precise and definite signification annexed to any general name, they all signifying indifferently a great number of particular ideas.
Philosophical controversies dismissed as “merely verbal”
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

9. What are the objects of human knowledge?
Either the ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind.
In addition, there are the perceivers, i.e., mind, spirit, soul, self.
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320

10. Objections and Replies
Everybody believes that matter exists independently.
Everybody believes that colors exist independently.
But this abolishes science. What about unperceived things, such as the earth moving around the sun?
We still can rely on astronomers
What about the inner workings of nature?
11/18/2018
Modern Philosophy PHIL320