A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley

by John Russell Roberts

George Berkeley notoriously 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 and common sense requires that we develop a better understanding of the four principle components of Berkeley's positive metaphysics: The nature of being, the divine language thesis, the active/passive distinction, and the nature of spirits.

Roberts begins by focusing on Berkeley's view of the nature of being. He elucidates Berkeley's view on Locke and the Cartesians and by examining Berkeley's views about related concepts such as unity and simplicity . From there he moves on to Berkeley's philosophy of language arguing that scrutiny of the famous "Introduction" to the Principles of Human Knowledge reveals that Berkeley identified the ideational theory of meaning and understanding as the root cause of some of the worst of man's intellectual errors, not "abstract ideas." Abstract ideas are, rather, the most debilitating symptom of this underlying ailment. In place of the ideational theory, Berkeley defends a rudimentary "use theory" of meaning. This understanding of Berkeley's approach to semantics is then applied to the divine language thesis and is shown to have important consequences for Berkeley's pragmatic approach to the ontology of natural objects and for his approach to our knowledge of, and relation to other minds,
including God's. Turning next to Berkeley's much aligned account of spirits, the author defends the coherence of Berkeley's view of spirits by way of providing an interpretation of the active/passive distinction as marking a normative distinction and by focusing on the role that divine language plays in letting Berkeley identify the soul with the will. With these four principles of Berkeley's philosophy in hand, he then returns to the topic of common sense and offers a defense of Berkeley's philosophy as built upon and expressive of the deepest metaphysical commitments of mainstream Christianity.

Roberts' reappraisal of this important figure should appeal to all historians of philosophy as well as scholars in metaphysics and philosophy of language.

Genres: Philosophy

172 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly Amazing, even though I did not read all of it. In this book, Roberts sympathizes deeply with Berkeley, who is usually considered by secularists to be a remarkable thinker who preceded modern philosophy in some ways but did not take it to its logical conclusion, while Christians often dismiss him as a Gnostic. He was neither: his philosophy is fully defensible and C.S. Lewis famously said that God was a Berkeleyan idealist. This book shows that the critiques made by scholars of him being inconsistent are incredibly bad readings, and that he was not an occasionalist (i.e. someone who believed there were no secondary causes in the world.) He also does so while defining Berkeley's unusual terms. One of the biggest obstacles to adopting Berkeleyan idealism is the fact that he seems to reduce things to perception, but it turns out the the real world is God's perception and so things still exist even when we don't perceive them. Berkeley, it turns out, was a philosopher who stood by the mob. This is a brilliant book and everyone who says anything about Berkeley should read it.

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason most books about Berkeley suffer from poor organization and confusing prose; this one is unfortunately not an exception. Perhaps this is inevitable given Berkeley's corpus is rather scattered, but this was not the book that most effectively and systematically expressed his thought.