ABSTRACT On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas—entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of inhering in it, but in virtue of being perceived by it. This metaphysical insight, once correctly understood, gives us the resources to (...) solve a central problem that still plagues the philosophy of perception—the problem of how, given the power of the mind to create phenomenally rich experiences, ordinary perception can nonetheless be said to acquaint us with the mind-independent world. (shrink)

Like their contemporary counterparts, early modern philosophers find themselves in a predicament. On one hand, there are strong reasons to deny that sensations are representations. For there seems to be nothing in the world for them to represent. On the other hand, some sensory representations seem to be required for us to experience bodies. How else could one perceive the boundaries of a body, except by means of different shadings of color? I argue that Nicolas Malebranche offers an extreme -- (...) and ultimately unworkable -- attempt to solve this riddle. Most commentators claim that Malebranche defends an adverbial theory of sensation, according to which a sensation is merely a way in which an act of sensing happens. The adverbial reading is wrong, or so I argue. Once we arrive at a more accurate reading, we shall see that his position is much more strange than is currently thought. Nevertheless, Malebranche’s view is similar to the adverbial theory in one respect, albeit it at a very high level of generality. His view thus inherits two of the main problems that afflict adverbial theories. Although Malebranche fails to solve them, his ingenious attempts to do so are instructive. (shrink)

Berkeley didn’t write very much about his ‘philosophy of mind’ and what he did write is rather perplexing and perhaps inconsistent. The most basic problem is that it just isn’t clear what a mind (or, more accurately, a spirit) is for Berkeley. Unsurprisingly, many interpretations tend to understand Berkeleian spirit in models provided by other philosophers – interpretations in which Berkeleian spirit turns out to be a close cousin of the Cartesian ego, Lockean spiritual substratum, Lockean self, and Humean bundle (...) of perceptions. Stephen H. Daniel and I have each offered different interpretations of Berkeley that refuse to reduce Berkeley’s account of spirit to that of other canonical thinkers and, indeed, which place Berkeleian spirit in some tension with the Aristotelian‐Cartesian‐Lockean traditions. In this paper, I argue that Daniel’s account is too extreme in that it implausibly removes Berkeley from this tradition altogether. I show how my account avoids that extreme and I defend it against some objections. (shrink)