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Berkeley's Ontology and the Epistemology of Idealism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Muehlmann
Robert Muehlmann*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

Berkeley's idealism consists of the following claims. Objects such as chairs, apples, mountains, and our bodies are combinations of sensible qualities. Sensible qualities and combinations of such are ideas or sensations. In the philosophical sense of ‘substance’ there is no such entity as a substance. There are minds which perceive and will: When a mind perceives it has sensations or ideas; and when a mind wills it produces or causes sensations or ideas. These claims are grounded in the ontological and epistemological framework of assumptions, distinctions and arguments informing Berkeley's doctrine that esse est percipi aut percipere. The purpose of this paper is to explore and expose the main features of that framework.

What is the ontological force and import on Berkeley's claim that esse est percipi? One influential recent suggestion1 is this: Berkeley holds that (1) material substances do not exist, (2) the analysis of sensible things yields nothing but sensible qualities, (3) minds are mental substances and (4) no sensible quality or collection of sensible qualities can exist without inhering in some substance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 89 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 The pivotal article of this interpretation is Allaire, E. B. “Berkeley's Idealism,“ Theoria (1963), pp. 229-44Google Scholar Cummins, . P. followed Allaire's, lead in “Perceptual Relativity and Ideas in the Mind,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 24 (1963), pp. 202-14;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Berkeley's Likeness Principle,” journal of History of Philosophy 4 (1966), pp. 63–69. Van lten, R.J. defends Allaire's claim (3) that Berkeley's analysis of mind yields a mental substance in “Berkeley's Analysis of Mind,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 24 (1964), pp. 375-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Watson, R. A. The Downfall of Cartesianism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 113Google Scholar, and Hausrnan, A.“Solipsism and Berkeley's Alleged Realism,” Revue lnternationale de Philosophe 22 (1968), p. 407Google Scholar.

2 The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Luce, A.A. and Jessop, T.E. (9 vols., London: 1948-57).Google Scholar References in the text of the paper are, by section numbers, to The Principles of Human Knowledge and, by page number, to Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in vol. 2 of the Works. References to the Philosophical Commentaries are by entry numbers in vol. 1 of the Works.

3 I have deliberately dropped from this passage Berkeley's suggestion of a counterfactual analysis of the meaning of ‘exist’ (“if I was in my study I might perceive it“). It seems clear that this suggestion does no work. See Davis, J. W. “Berkeley and Phenomenalism,” Dialogue 1 (1962), pp. 67–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See P. Cummins, “Berkeley's Likeness Principle,” p. 64.

5 Berkeley does not apply the identification argument to sounds and colours, preferring to use Hylas's “concessions” to the relativity arguments to “establish“ their mind-dependence. This has been a source of some confusion to Berkeley scholars, leading them to ignore Berkeley's disclaimer in section 15 of the Principles and to read the Dialogues as if perceptual relativity arguments are a major support for esse est percipi. But a careful examination of the text reveals that it is Hylas, not Philonous, who draws the appropriate conclusion with respect to sound and colour. Moreover, it is clear that, though Berkeley does not explicitly use it, the identification argument applies as well to sound and colour as it does to heat and cold, tastes and odours.

6 At sections 22-23 of the Principles (and Dialogues p. 200) Berkeley explicitly rests h1s case on another argument. As this argument occurs much later in both works, seems more obviously to beg the question and is therefore less plausible than the identification argument, I shall ignore it. I am, of course, not claiming that the identification argument is sound. The confusions surrounding Berkeley's use of ‘identical’ and ‘inseparable’ are sufficient by themselves to vitiate it. But considering the historical context, it does have a good deal of initial plausibility.

7 Part (II) of the abstraction criterion, as far as I can determine, is nowhere stated explicitly by Berkeley. But it is hard to see how he could deny it, and harder still to see how he could get along without it. It might be urged, though, that section 5 of the Principles does contain an explicit appeal to part (II) inas much as Berkeley says here that two entities can be conceived apart from each other only if “they may really exist or be actually perceived asunder,“ suggesting that the later disjunct is the ground of the former. But as the conclusion, in this context, is esse est percipi itself, it seems too much like putting the cart before the horse to suppose that this constitutes an explicit statement of the criterion in its general form.

8 Cummins, in “Berkeley's Ideas of Sense,” Nous 9 (1975), pp. 55–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that this is Thomas Reid's view of the ground of Berkeley's idealism. Apparently, it is also Cummins's latest interpretation.

9 Op. cit., p. 234.

10 Ibid., p. 237. P. Cummins, in “Perceptual Relativity and Ideas in the Mind,“ p. 210, is even more explicit: “perceptual relativity, with the addition of the assumptions that what is not a quality in a body must be a quality in a mind and that what is a quality of a thinking substance cannot be a property of an unthinking substance, yields the conclusion that neither primary nor secondary qualities can exist apart from the mind in an unthinking substance.“

11 Ibid., p. 235.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 “Berkeley's View of Spirit,” in New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus (New York, 1966), p. 63.

15 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), II, xxi, 73.

16 I. C. Tipton, op. cit., p. 69, asserts that Berkeley's final view of perception in the Commentaries is “that passive reception could never be experience, and that there could be no experience unless the mind was active about what was received from without.” What I say below suggests that this is, perhaps, a hasty conclusion.

17 Op. cit., p. 244, my italics.

18 Based on his inherence interpretation of Berkeley's, idealism, Allaire, in “The Attack on Substance: Descartes to Hume,” Dialogue 3 (1964), pp. 284–87Google Scholar, gives a systematic defense of a version of this view.

19 For a detailed and insightful examination of Hume's analysis of causality, see Hausman, A. “Hume's Theory of Relations,” Nous 1 (1967), pp. 255-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.