Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs

Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs

Author: Manuel Fasko

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-04-22

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 3111197751

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This volume focuses on Berkeley's doctrine of signs. The 'doctrine of signs' refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as 'signs' of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions - such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of Vision in 1710, to those works written towards the end of life, including Alciphron in 1732, Berkeley is at pains to emphasise the crucial role that sign-usage, particularly (but not only) in language, plays in human life. Berkeley also connects sign-usage to our (human) relationship with God: an issue that was right of the heart of his philosophical project. The contributions in this volume explore the myriad ways that Berkeley built on such insights to better understand a range of philosophical issues - issues of epistemology, language, perception, mental representation, mathematics, science, and theology. The aim of this volume is to establish that the doctrine of signs can be seen as one of the unifying themes of Berkeley's philosophy. What's more, this theme is one which spans his whole philosophical corpus; not just his best-known works like the Principles and the Three Dialogues, but also his works on science, mathematics, and theology.


Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics

Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics

Author: Douglas M. Jesseph

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-12-15

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0226398951

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In this first modern, critical assessment of the place of mathematics in Berkeley's philosophy and Berkeley's place in the history of mathematics, Douglas M. Jesseph provides a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley's work. Jesseph challenges the prevailing view that Berkeley's mathematical writings are peripheral to his philosophy and argues that mathematics is in fact central to his thought, developing out of his critique of abstraction. Jesseph's argument situates Berkeley's ideas within the larger historical and intellectual context of the Scientific Revolution. Jesseph begins with Berkeley's radical opposition to the received view of mathematics in the philosophy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when mathematics was considered a "science of abstractions." Since this view seriously conflicted with Berkeley's critique of abstract ideas, Jesseph contends that he was forced to come up with a nonabstract philosophy of mathematics. Jesseph examines Berkeley's unique treatments of geometry and arithmetic and his famous critique of the calculus in The Analyst. By putting Berkeley's mathematical writings in the perspective of his larger philosophical project and examining their impact on eighteenth-century British mathematics, Jesseph makes a major contribution to philosophy and to the history and philosophy of science.


Berkeley's Doctrine of Notions

Berkeley's Doctrine of Notions

Author: Daniel E. Flage

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-24

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0429639953

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This book, first published in 1987, offers a reconstruction of Berkeley’s doctrine on notions by examining the implications of his repeated suggestion that there is a close relationship between his doctrine and his semantic theory. The study ties in with some of the most important topics in modern analytic philosophy, and casts important light on modern philosophical concerns as well as on Berkeley’s thought.


Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science

Berkeley’s Philosophy of Science

Author: Richard J. Brook

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9401019940

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Philonous: You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards, in a round column, to a certain height, at which it breaks and falls back into the basin from whence it rose, its ascent as well as descent proceeding from the same uniform law or principle of gravitation. Just so, the same principles which at first view, lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common 1 sense. Although major works on Berkeley have considered his Philosophy of 1 George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, ed. Colin Murray Turbayne, (third and final edition; London 1734); (New York: The Bobbs Merrill Company, Inc., Library of Liberal Arts, 1965), p. 211. Berkeley, in general, conveniently numbered sections in his works, and in the text of the essay, we will refer if possible to the title and section number. References to the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous will be also made in the text and refer to the dialogue number and page in the Turbayne edition cited above.


Peirce on Signs

Peirce on Signs

Author: James Hoopes

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-02-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1469616815

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Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is rapidly becoming recognized as the greatest American philosopher. At the center of his philosophy was a revolutionary model of the way human beings think. Peirce, a logician, challenged traditional models by describing thoughts not as "ideas" but as "signs," external to the self and without meaning unless interpreted by a subsequent thought. His general theory of signs -- or semiotic -- is especially pertinent to methodologies currently being debated in many disciplines. This anthology, the first one-volume work devoted to Peirce's writings on semiotic, provides a much-needed, basic introduction to a complex aspect of his work. James Hoopes has selected the most authoritative texts and supplemented them with informative headnotes. His introduction explains the place of Peirce's semiotic in the history of philosophy and compares Peirce's theory of signs to theories developed in literature and linguistics.


The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Author: Ernst Cassirer

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1965-09-10

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780300000399

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The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer's works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science--the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. "These three volumes alone (apart from Cassirer's other papers and books) make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if 'The Golden Bough' had been written in philosophical rather than in historical terms."--F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature


Writings of Charles S. Peirce: Volume 2, 1867–1871

Writings of Charles S. Peirce: Volume 2, 1867–1871

Author: Charles S. Peirce

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1984-06-22

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 0253016665

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"For anyone seriously interested in Peirce, or in nineteenth-century American philosophy, or in American intellectual history, or in philosophy in general, or in semiotics and its philosophical import, these volumes should be required reading." —Murray G. Murphey, Semiotica


The Reciprocity of Perceiver and Environment

The Reciprocity of Perceiver and Environment

Author: Thomas J. Lombardo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1315514397

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Originally published in 1987, this title intended to historically reveal, through tracing Gibson’s development, the substance of his views and how they bore upon general philosophical issues in theories of knowledge, and to investigate in detail the historical context of Gibson’s theoretical position within psychology. Though the author has included a history of Gibson’s perceptual research and experimentation, the focus is to explicate the ‘dynamic abstract form’ of Gibson’s ecological approach. His emphasis is philosophical and theoretical, attempting to bring out the direction Gibson was moving in and how such changes could restructure the theoretical fabric of psychology. He devotes considerable attention to the Greeks, Medievalists, and the founders of the Scientific Revolution. This is because Gibson’s theoretical challenge runs deep into the structure of western thought. The authors’ central goal was to set Gibson’s ecological theory within the historical context of fundamental philosophical-scientific issues.