Berkeley's Idealism A Critical Examination

by Dicker, Georges

• ISBN13: 9780195381450
• ISBN10: 0195381459
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In George Berkeley's two most important works, thePrinciples of Human KnowledgeandThree Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, he argued that there is no such thing as matter: only minds and ideas exist, and physical things are nothing but collections of ideas. In defense of this idealism, he advanced a battery of challenging arguments purporting to show that the very notion of matter is self-contradictory or meaningless, and that even if it were possible for matter to exist, we could not know that it does; and he then put forward an alternative world-view that purported to refute both skepticism and atheism. Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, Georges Dicker here examines both the destructive and the constructive sides of Berkeley's thought, against the background of the mainstream views that he rejected. Dicker's accessible and text-based analysis of Berkeley's arguments shows that thePrinciplesand theDialoguesdovetail and complement each other in a seamless way, rather than being self-contained. Dicker's book avoids the incompleteness that results from studying just one of his two main works; instead, he treats the whole as a visionary response to the issues of modern philosophy- such as primary and secondary qualities, external-world skepticism, the substance-property relation, the causal roles of human agents and of God. In addition to relating Berkeley's work to his contemporaries, Dicker discusses work by today's top Berkeley scholars, and uses notions and distinctions forged by recent and contemporary analytic philosophers of perception.Berkeley's Idealismboth advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

Author Biography

Georges Dicker is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophic Exchange at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. He is the author of Dewey's Theory of Knowing, Perceptual Knowledge: An Analytical and Historical Study, Descartes: An Analytical and History Introduction, Hume's Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Introduction, Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical Introduction and of numerous journal articles.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: Some Themes of Mainstream Modern Philosophy, with Particular Attention to Locke
1. The Theory of Primary and Secondary Qualities
2. The Representational Theory of Perception and the Problem of Perception
3. Locke's Defense of the Senses

Part II: Berkeley's Direct Arguments for Idealism
4. Berkeley's Case for Idealism in Principles I, Sections 1-7
5. Direct Arguments for Idealism in the First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous
6. The Argument from the Ego-Centric Predicament
Notes

Part III: Berkeley's Indirect Arguments for Idealism
7. The Likeness Principle
8. Berkeley's Attack on the Theory of Primary and Secondary Qualities
9. Substance/Substratum
10. The Epistemological Argument

Part IV: Berkeley's Positive Metaphysics
11. Mind
12. God, nature, agency, and causation in perception
13. Continuity
14. Intersubjectivity
Notes
Bibliography: works cited