‘The books are in the study as before’: Berkeley's claims about real physical objects

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Notes

¹An excellent recent example of this approach is George Pappas, Berkeley's Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

²All references to Berkeley's works will be to The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne edited by T. E. Jessop and A. A. Luce (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1948–57). All references to Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous will be to 3Dx, page number. All references to Principles of Human Knowledge will be to PHK, section number. All references to Essay towards a New Theory of Vision will be to NTV, section number.

³Other passages where Berkeley is similarly distinguishing his own account from one which assumes the existence of an unperceivable, mind-independent reality paint a similar picture. A good example is one of Philonous's early speeches in the Third Dialogue:

I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them. To be plain, it is my opinion, that the real things are those very things I see and feel, and perceive by my senses. These I know, and finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings. A piece of sensible bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten thousand times as much of that insensible, unintelligible, real bread you speak of. It is likewise my opinion, that the colours and other sensible qualities are on the objects. I cannot for my life help thinking that snow is white, and fire hot. You indeed, who by snow and fire mean certain external, unperceived, unperceiving substances, are in the right to deny whiteness, or heat, to be affections inherent in them. But I, who understand by those words the things I see and feel, am obliged to think like other folks. And as I am no sceptic with regard to the nature of things, so neither am I as their existence. That a thing should be really perceived by my senses, and at the same time not really exist, is to me a plain contradiction; since I cannot prescind or abstract, even in thought, the existence of a sensible thing from its being perceived. Wood, stones, fire, water, flesh, iron, and the like things, which I name and discourse of, are things that I know. And I should not have known them, but that I perceived them by my senses; and things perceived by the senses are immediately perceived; and things immediately perceived are ideas; and ideas cannot exist without the mind; when therefore they are actually perceived, there can be no doubt of their existence.

(3DIII, 229–30)

⁴This is the line that, for example, George Pappas takes when discussing this difficulty.

⁵Again I borrow the word ‘typically’ from George Pappas, although the use of this term has also been discussed recently in more detail by Tom Stoneham, in Berkeley's World: an examination of the Three Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

⁶See, for example, 3DIII, 246, 3DIII, 258.

⁸A similar point is made in PHK, 87: ‘Things remaining the same, our ideas vary, and which of them, or even whether any of them at all represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine.’ See also 3DIII, 246:

Farther, as our ideas are perpetually varied, without any change in the supposed real things, it necessarily follows thay cannot all be true copies of them: or if some are, and others are not, it is impossible to distinguish the former from the latter. And this plunges us yet deeper in uncertainty.

⁷3DII, 214.

⁹Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley's Doctrine of Notions: A Reconstruction based on his Theory of Meaning (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987) 69–74, and in ‘Berkeley, Individuation and Physical Objects’ in Individuation and Identity in Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, edited by K. R. Barber and Jorge J. E. Gracia (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994) 133–54.

¹⁰Richard Glauser, ‘The Problem of the Unity of a Physical Object in Berkeley’, in Re-examining Berkeley's Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) 50–81.

¹¹Richard Glauser provides an admirable discussion of such passages.