David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments `admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no existence apart from the spirits who transmit and receive (...) it. Kenneth P. Winkler presents these conclusions as natural consequences of Berkeley's reflections on such topics as representation, abstraction, necessary truth, and cause and effect. In the closing chapters Proefssor Winkler offers new interpretations of Berkeley's view on unperceived objects, corpuscularian science, and our knowledge of God and other minds. (shrink)

Berkeley’s capacity to conceive of mind-independent bodies was corrupted by his theory of representation. He thought that representation of things outside the mind depended on resemblance. Since ideas can resemble nothing than ideas, and all ideas are mind dependent, he concluded that we couldn’t form ideas of mind-independent bodies. More generally, he thought that we had no inner resembling proxies for mind-independent bodies, and so we couldn’t even form a notion of such things. Because conception is a suggestible faculty, Berkeley’s (...) arguments actually made it the case that he himself couldn’t conceive of mind-independent bodies. (shrink)

The following abbreviations are used to reference Berkeley’s works: PC “Philosophical Commentaries‘ Works 1:9--104 NTV An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision Works 1:171--239 PHK Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: Part 1 Works 2:41--113 3D Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Works 2:163--263 DM De Motu, or The Principle and Nature of Motion and the Cause of the Communication of Motions, trans. A.A. Luce Works 4:31--52.