New Interpretations of Berkeley's Thought

New Interpretations of Berkeley's Thought PDF Author: Stephen Hartley Daniel
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Overall, the essays indicate that, for Berkeley, our apprehension of the world as real depends on recognizing how the world expressed by our ideas is not a mere aggregate of disconnected bodies but is rather an integrated unity of the things we experience.

New Interpretations of Berkeley's Thought

New Interpretations of Berkeley's Thought PDF Author: Stephen Hartley Daniel
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Overall, the essays indicate that, for Berkeley, our apprehension of the world as real depends on recognizing how the world expressed by our ideas is not a mere aggregate of disconnected bodies but is rather an integrated unity of the things we experience.

Berkeley's Thought

Berkeley's Thought PDF Author: George S. Pappas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729314
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In this highly original account of Bishop George Berkeley's epistemological and metaphysical theories, George S. Pappas seeks to determine precisely what doctrines the philosopher held and what arguments he put forward to support them. Specifically, Pappas overturns accepted opinions about Berkeley's famous attack on the Lockean doctrine of abstract ideas. Berkeley's criticism of these ideas had been thought relevant only to his views on language and to his nominalism; Pappas persuasively argues that Berkeley's ideas about abstraction are crucial to nearly all of the fundamental principles that he defends.Pappas demonstrates how an adequate appreciation of Berkeley's views on abstraction can lead to an improved understanding of his important principle of esse is percipi, and of the arguments Berkeley proposes in support of this principle. Pappas also takes up Berkeley's widely rejected claim to be a philosopher of common sense. He assesses the validity of this self-description and considers why Berkeley might have chosen to align himself with a commonsense position. Pappas shows how three core concepts—abstraction, perception, and common sense—are central to and interdependent in the work of one of the major figures of early modern Western thought.

Berkeley: An Interpretation

Berkeley: An Interpretation PDF Author: Kenneth P. Winkler
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191520071
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
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 (though by no means inevitable) 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.

Berkeley

Berkeley PDF Author: Keota Fields
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739142976
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Berkeley: Ideas, Immaterialism, and Objective Presence offers a novel interpretation of the arc of George Berkeley's philosophical thought, from his theory of vision through his immaterialism and finally to his proof of God's existence. Keota Fields unifies these themes to focus on Berkeley's use of the Cartesian doctrine of objective presence, which demands causal explanations of the content of ideas. This is particularly so with respect to Berkeley's arguments for immaterialism. One of those arguments is typically read as a straightforward transitivity argument. After identifying material bodies with sensible objects, and the latter with ideas of sense, Berkeley concludes that putative material bodies are actually identical to collections of ideas of sense. George Pappas has recently defended an alternative reading that grounds Berkeley's immaterialism in his rejection of what Pappas calls category-transcendent abstract ideas: abstract ideas of beings, entia, or existence. Fields uses Pappas's interpretation as a framework for understanding Berkeley's immaterialism in terms of transcendental arguments. Early moderns routinely used the doctrine of objective presence to justify transcendental arguments for the existence of material substance. The claim was that physical qualities are necessary for any causal explanation of the content of sensory ideas; since those qualities are represented to perceivers as ontologically dependent, material substance is the necessary condition for the existence of physical qualities and a fortiori any causal explanation of the content of sensory ideas. On the reading defended here, Berkeley rejects Locke's transcendental argument for the existence of material substratum on the grounds that it turns decisively on the aforementioned category-transcendent abstract ideas, which Berkeley rejects as logically inconsistent. In its place, Berkeley offers his own transcendental argument designed to show that only minds and ideas exist. He uses that argument as a proof of God's existence-and ultimately to argue that the emergence of meaning from a material world simply cannot be explained. A portrait emerges of a thinker deeply engaged with the theories of his time, yet one who is captivated by the question of how meaning arises in the world. Students and scholars of the history of philosophy, particularly early modern history and the British Empiricists, will find this book to be a valuable addition to their collections.

Berkeley's Idealism

Berkeley's Idealism PDF Author: Georges Dicker
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195381467
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
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.

New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy

New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy PDF Author: Warren E. Steinkraus
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Why another book on Berkeley? For one thing, because he is so curiously modern. He was one of the pioneers of the empiricism and nominalism so popular today. He discussed with great clearness many of the issues with which present-day philosophers are concerned--the status of sense-data, the nature of causation, the relation of primary to secondary qualities, the problems of universals, the importance of language, the existence of other selves, and how we communicate with them.

A Metaphysics for the Mob

A Metaphysics for the Mob PDF Author: John Russell Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Berkeley claimed that his immaterialist metaphysics was not only consistent with common sense but that it was also integral to its defense. Roberts argues that understanding the basic connection between Berkeley's philosophy requires that we develop a better understanding of the principle components of his positive metaphyics.

Berkeley's Argument for Idealism

Berkeley's Argument for Idealism PDF Author: Samuel C. Rickless
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199669422
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In the early 18th century George Berkeley made the astonishing claim that physical objects such as tables and chairs are nothing but collections of ideas. Samuel Rickless presents a new account of Berkeley's controversial argument, and suggests it is the philosopher's greatest legacy: not only is it valid, but it may well be sound.

An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision

An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision PDF Author: George Berkeley
Publisher: IndyPublish.com
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Berkeley's Three Dialogues

Berkeley's Three Dialogues PDF Author: Stefan Storrie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198755686
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
"Many of the papers in this volume were presented at the 'Berkeley and the Three dialogues' conference at Trinity College Dublin in 2014"--Page vii.