George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy

This book focuses on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, it indicates how he 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 so transform the issues with which he is engaged that his insights—for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects—are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

O Ceticismo de George Berkeley na Leitura de Thomas Reid

The paper advances two hypotheses concerning Thomas Reid’s reading of George Berkeley’s immaterialist system. First, it is argued that, on Reid’s view, Berkeley is skeptic about the existence of the objects of the material world, not in virtue of a doubt about the senses but for his adoption of the principle that ideas are the immediate objects of the operations of mind. On Reid’s view, that principle is a skeptical principle by its own nature. Secondly, it is argued that Berkeley really accepts in his system the notion of ‘idea’ such as Reid understands it, namely, as an entity distinct from mind and its operations.

Or Abstractum

George Berkeley is famous for the metaphysical principle esse is percipi or percipere (“to be is to be perceived or to be a perceiver”). Many Berkeleyan idealists take this principle to be incompatible with Platonic realism about abstract objects, and thus opt either for nominalism or divine conceptualism on which they are construed as divine ideas. In this paper, I argue that Berkeleyan idealism is consistent with a Platonic realism in which abstracta exist outside the divine mind. This allows the Berkeleyan to expand Berkeley’s principle to read: esse is percipi or percipere or abstractum.

Peter Zinkernagel and David Favrholdt: A Response to George Berkeley in Twentieth-Century Danish Philosophy

Berkeley’s criticism of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities is a challenge to epistemologists. Do we experience a mind-independent reality, even though we do it with the help of senses bound to give us subjective experiences? Berkeley – or a straw man by that name (i.e. Berkeley without God) – played an important part as sparring partner for an influential development of Danish theoretical philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. The protagonists here are Peter Zinkernagel (1921–2003) and David Favrholdt (1931–2012). Zinkernagel held an extraordinary appointment as research fellow at the University of Copenhagen. Favrholdt was the founding father of the Philosophical Institute at Odense University (today: University of Southern Denmark). This essay focuses on the constructive moments in Zinkernagel’s alternative to immaterialism, being based on a distinction between perception and action, and on Favrholdt’s development of a reconstruction of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.