Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World PDF full book. Access full book title Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World by Kenneth L. Pearce. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Kenneth L. Pearce
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192507559
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.
Author: Kenneth L. Pearce
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192507559
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.
Author: Dave Weinstein
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN: 9781423602545
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why is Berkeley famous worldwide? Because of its inventiveness, its liberal attitudes, and its artists and writers. Did you know that public radio, California cuisine, the lie detector, the atomic bomb, free speech, the hot tub, and yuppies were all invented in this all-American city? J. Stitt Wilson, Berkeley's first Socialist mayor, once said, "Any kind of a day in Berkeley seems sweeter than the best day anywhere else." In How Berkeley Became Berkeley, Dave Weinstein goes about showing us just that. He tells the story of this unique city from the beginning-the 1840s-to present day by focusing on the events and people that made Berkeley into the famous-and infamous-place that it continues to be. More than any other general book about Berkeley, How Berkeley Became Berkeley brings the history of the town and the university to life with anecdotes that are amusing, surprising, sometimes shocking, and often touching. Dave Weinstein, a native of Long Island, New York, received his undergraduate degree in art history at Columbia University in 1973, and then studied journalism at UC Berkeley. He has lived in the Bay Area for thirty years, and spent twenty years as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers. Dave has written two books, Signature Architects of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the text for a photo book Berkeley Rocks. He writes for the magazine CA Modern, and for four years has been writing a popular series of architect profiles for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Author: Tom Stoneham
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198752370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
Tom Stoneham offers a clear and detailed study of Berkeley's metaphysics and epistemology, as presented in his classic work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, originally published in 1713 and still widely studied. Stoneham shows that Berkeley is an important and systematic philosopher whose work is still of relevance to philosophers today.
Author: Stephen Hartley Daniel
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802093485
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
George Berkeley (1685-1753) is perhaps most famous for his assertion that our knowledge of the world is nothing other than the experience of our ideas. Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy examines this aspect of Berkeley's thought, arguing that such a viewpoint assumes that physical objects and minds are better understood when discussed in the contexts of science, morality, and religion. This collection confronts the question: how can we know anything about the world if all we know are our ideas? Comprised of eleven previously unpublished essays by leading scholars in the field, Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy demonstrates how things in the world are intrinsically related to the sequence of experiences that constitute minds. This collection also discusses how the harmony of experience reveals strategies for recognizing the inherently active character of reality. Ultimately, this volume represents a major contribution to the study of Berkeley's philosophy by critiquing the tendency to generalize his thought as a version of theologically modified solipsism. In this way, it is a unique and invaluable addition to Berkeley scholarship.
Author: Tom Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691217491
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 648
Get Book Here
Book Description
A comprehensive intellectual biography of the Enlightenment philosopher In George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. From his early brilliance as a student and fellow at Trinity College Dublin to his later years as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley brought his searching and powerful intellect to bear on the full range of eighteenth-century thought and experience. Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley’s life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without any physical substance underlying them. But he put forward this counterintuitive philosophy in support of the existence and ultimate sovereignty of God. Berkeley was an energetic social reformer, deeply interested in educational and economic improvement, including for the indigenous peoples of North America, yet he believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy and defended slavery. And although he spent much of his life in Ireland, he followed his time at Trinity with years of travel that took him to London, Italy, and New England, where he spent two years trying to establish a university for Bermuda, before returning to Ireland to take up an Anglican bishopric in a predominantly Catholic country. Jones draws on the full range of Berkeley’s writings, from philosophical treatises to personal letters and journals, to probe the deep connections between his life and work. The result is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of a major Enlightenment thinker and the world in which he lived.
Author: Colin Murray Turbayne
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816610665
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
Berkeley was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In contemporary philosophy the works of George Berkeley are considered models of argumentative discourse; his paradoxes have a further value to teachers because, like Zeno's, they challenge a beginning student to find the submerged fallacy. And as a final, triumphant perversion of Berkeley's intent, his central contribution is still commonly viewed as an argument for skepticism - the very position he tried to refute. This limited approach to Berkeley has obscured his accomplishments in other areas of thought - his account of language, his theories of meaning and reference, his philosophy of science. These subjects and others are taken up in a collection of twenty essays, most of them given at a conference in Newport, Rhode Island, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Berkeley's American sojourn of 1728–31. The essays constitute a broad survey of problems tackled by Berkeley and still of interest to philosophers, as well as topics of historical interest less familiar to modern readers. Its comprehensive scope will make this book appropriate for text use.
Author: Margaret Atherton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119532078
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
Presents a concise and comprehensive analysis of George Berkeley’s thought and the impact of his intellectual contributions to philosophy In this latest addition to the Blackwell Great Minds series, noted scholar of early modern philosophy Margaret Atherton examines Berkeley’s most influential work and demonstrates the significant conceptual impact of his ideas in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. A concise and rigorous primer on Berkeley’s essential writings and contributions to modern philosophy Written by a leading scholar of early modern philosophy Offers insight into the foundations of modern metaphysical and religious philosophy Equips readers to find firm footing in Berkeley’s wider body of published work in the canon of Western philosophy
Author: John Shand
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317494393
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
Central Works of Philosophy is a major multi-volume collection of essays on the core texts of the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato's Republic to Quine's Word and Object, the five volumes range over 2,500 years of philosophical writing covering the best, most representative, and most influential work of some of our greatest philosophers, each of them primary texts studied at undergraduate level. Each essay has been specially commissioned and provides an overview of the work, clear and authoritative exposition of its central ideas, and an assessment of the work's importance then and now. Each essay equips the reader with the resources and confidence to go on to read the works themselves. Together these books provide an unrivaled companion for studying and reading philosophy, one that introduces the reader to the masterpleces of the western philosophical canon and some of the greatest minds that have ever lived talking about the profoundest most exciting problems there are. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a brilliant outpouring of philosophical thought unprecedented in human history. Together philosophy and science pushed medieval and Renaissance scholasticism aside to lay the foundations of the modern world. Beginning with Descartes' Meditations, the contributors examine some of the period's most seminal philosophical texts: Spinoza's Ethics, which presents a complete picture of reality that has at its heart how we can be good, the Monadology, in which Leibniz describes what must underpin reality if it is to be fully explained, Hobbes' Leviathan, which reminds us of the dangers of the unchecked brutality of humanity; Rousseau's Social Contract, a vision of how human nature can be changed for the better in a new society, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding which wishes us to grasp that we must make knowledge our own through experience not authority, Berkeley's attack on materialism in his Treatise and Hume's search for rational justification for our most basic beliefs about the world in his Treatise of Human Nature. Together these essays offer students a remarkable survey of the key texts and core ideas that make up the age of rationalism and empiricism.
Author: Edwin S. Gaustad
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300113440
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and Anglican priest, settled in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the few places in New England that was hospitable to Anglicans. There his lively mind and sympathetic spirit involved him in a variety of interests. This book is an account of an episode of his religious life of colonial New England.
Author: Damian Ilodigwe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Get Book Here
Book Description
Berkeley is popular in the philosophical tradition as the philosopher who denied the existence of matter in favour of spiritual substance. His esse est percipi thesis is understandably seen as a recipe for subjective idealism. While there is a point to this reading of Berkeley, it remains to be seen whether it does justice to the full significance of Berkeley’s opposition to philosophical materialism. In this book, essentially a sympathetic reconstruction of Berkeley’s philosophy, Ilodigwe approaches Berkeley’s Immaterialism from the standpoint of the philosophical issues raised by the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century. He argues that when approached in this manner, Berkeley’s opposition to philosophical materialism not only emerges as an attempt to overcome false abstractions, but it also becomes possible to make sense of his claimed alliance with common sense in his battle against philosophical materialism. While the realist portrait of Berkeley that emerges from this exercise is not free from difficulties, it arguably offers us a fuller conspectus of Berkeley’s philosophy of immaterialism.
