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

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: 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'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.

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.

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.

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


George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy

George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy PDF Author: Stephen H. Daniel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192893890
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Stephen Daniel presents a study of the philosophy of George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. Daniel does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, this book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in ways that transform the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights--for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects--are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment

George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Silvia Parigi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048192439
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
George Berkeley was considered "the most engaging and useful man in Ireland in the eighteenth century". This hyperbolic statement refers both to Berkeley’s life and thought; in fact, he always considered himself a pioneer called to think and do new things. He was an empiricist well versed in the sciences, an amateur of the mechanical arts, as well as a metaphysician; he was the author of many completely different discoveries, as well as a very active Christian, a zealous bishop and the apostle of the Bermuda project. The essays collected in this volume, written by some leading scholars, aim to reconstruct the complexity of Berkeley’s figure, without selecting "major" works, nor searching for "coherence" at any cost. They will focus on different aspects of Berkeley’s thought, showing their intersections; they will explore the important contributions he gave to various scientific disciplines, as well as to the eighteenth-century philosophical and theological debate. They will highlight the wide influence that his presently most neglected or puzzling books had at the time; they will refuse any anachronistical trial of Berkeley’s thought, judged from a contemporary point of view.