Berkeley's Puzzle
Berkeley's Puzzle

Author: John Campbell

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-08-21

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0191025542

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Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees, etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

Berkeley's Puzzle
Berkeley's Puzzle

Author: John Campbell

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0198716257

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Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees, etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

George Berkeley: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide
George Berkeley: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Author: Oxford University Press

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 0199808686

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This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study Philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibligraphies.com.

George Berkeley
George Berkeley

Author: Tom Jones

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0691159807

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"This book offers a comprehensive account of the life and thought of the major Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. Building on a study of Berkeley's better known early life and work as an immaterialist philosopher in Trinity College, Dublin the book explores connections between Berkeley's metaphysics and every aspect of his career. Touring Italy as a chaplain and tutor, campaigning for and travelling to Rhode Island to establish a university on Bermuda, working as a bishop in rural Ireland, writing on Christian apologetics, economic stimulus, and the philosophical implications of drinking tar-water - all of these activities are occasions for Berkeley to practice philosophy. In his family life, his daily routines, his educational projects, this book discovers a thinker motivated by finding the means to bring human wills into conformity with God's will, and defending laws, rules, order and hierarchy to do so. This book presents research into the institutional history of schools, universities, societies and the church, studies the neglected figures - particularly women - whose presence in Berkeley's life was significant, and describes his relationships with social groups other than white Protestants in order to revise our understanding of a man who was at once a radical metaphysician, a missionary Protestant, a conservative social reformer, and a person of intense religious commitment. In telling his story, the book expands our understanding of the relationship between canonical early modern philosophy, the eighteenth-century Church, and the history of educational and social improvement"--

Perception, Causation, and Objectivity
Perception, Causation, and Objectivity

Author: Johannes Roessler

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-07-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191621315

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To be a 'commonsense realist' is to hold that perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Over the past few centuries this view has faced formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics, and, more recently, cognitive science. However, in recent years there has been renewed interest in it, due to new work on perceptual consciousness, objectivity, and causal understanding. This volume collects nineteen original essays by leading philosophers and psychologists on these topics. Questions addressed include: What are the commitments of commonsense realism? Does it entail any particular view of the nature of perceptual experience, or any particular view of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge? Should we think of commonsense realism as a view held by some philosophers, or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to commonsense realism in virtue of the experience we enjoy or the concepts we use or the explanations we give? Is commonsense realism defensible, and if so how, in the face of the formidable criticism it faces? Specific issues addressed in the philosophical essays include the status of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking. The scientific essays present a range of perspectives on the development, phylogenetic and ontogenetic, of the human adult conception of perception.

The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley
The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 704

ISBN-13: 0190873434

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The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley is a compendious examination of a vast array of topics in the philosophy of George Berkeley (1685-1753), Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, the famous idealist and most illustrious Irish philosopher. Berkeley is best known for his denial of the existence of material substance and his insistence that the only things that exist in the universe are minds (including God) and their ideas; however, Berkeley was a polymath who contributed to a variety of different disciplines, not well distinguished from philosophy in the eighteenth century, including the theory and psychology of vision, the nature and functioning of language, the debate over infinitesimals in mathematics, political philosophy, economics, chemistry (including his favoured panacea, tar-water), and theology. This volume includes contributions from thirty-four expert commentators on Berkeley's philosophy, some of whom provide a state-of-the-art account of his philosophical achievements, and some of whom place his philosophy in historical context by comparing and contrasting it with the views of his contemporaries (including Mandeville, Collier, and Edwards), as well as with philosophers who preceded him (such as Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Leibniz) and others who succeeded him (such as Hume, Reid, Kant, and Shepherd).

Acquaintance
Acquaintance

Author: Jonathan Knowles

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-11-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0192525239

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Bertrand Russell famously distinguished between 'knowledge by acquaintance' and 'knowledge by description'. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, many philosophers viewed the notion of acquaintance with suspicion, associating it with Russellian ideas that they would wish to reject. However in the past decade or two the concept has undergone a striking revival in mainstream 'analytic' philosophy—acquaintance is, it seems, respectable again. This volume showcases the great variety of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language for which philosophers are currently employing the notion of acquaintance. It is the first collection of new essays devoted to the topic of acquaintance, featuring chapters from many of the world's leading experts in this area. Opening with an extensive introductory essay, which provides some historical background and summarizes the main debates and issues concerning acquaintance, the remaining thirteen contributions are grouped thematically into four sections: phenomenal consciousness, perceptual experience, reference, and epistemology.

Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Author: P. J. E. Kail

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1139915819

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George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge is a crucial text in the history of empiricism and in the history of philosophy more generally. Its central and seemingly astonishing claim is that the physical world cannot exist independently of the perceiving mind. The meaning of this claim, the powerful arguments in its favour, and the system in which it is embedded, are explained in a highly lucid and readable fashion and placed in their historical context. Berkeley's philosophy is, in part, a response to the deep tensions and problems in the new philosophy of the early modern period and the reader is offered an account of this intellectual milieu. The book then follows the order and substance of the Principles whilst drawing on materials from Berkeley's other writings. This volume is the ideal introduction to Berkeley's Principles and will be of great interest to historians of philosophy in general.

Learning from Our Mistakes
Learning from Our Mistakes

Author: William J. Talbott

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0197567657

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In Learning from Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World, William J. Talbott provides a new framework for understanding the history of Western epistemology and uses it to propose a new way of understanding rational belief that can be applied to pressing social and political issues. Thisframework is used to articulate a new theory of prejudice and a new diagnosis of the sources of inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as insight into the proliferation of tribal and fascist epistemologies based on alt-facts and alt-truth.Talbott's new model of rational belief is not a model of a theorem prover in mathematics - It is a model of a good learner. Being a good learner requires sensitivity to clues, the imaginative ability to generate alternative explanatory narratives that fit the clues, and the ability to select themost coherent explanatory narrative. Sensitivity to clues requires sensitivity not only to evidence that supports one's own beliefs, but also to evidence that casts doubt on them. One of the most important characteristics of a good learner is the ability to correct mistakes.From this model, Talbott articulates nine principles that help to explain the difference between rational and irrational belief. Talbott contrasts his approach with the approach of historically important philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, as wellas with a range of contemporary approaches, including pragmatism, Bayesianism, and naturalism. Learning from Our Mistakes offers a new lens through which to interpret the history of Western epistemology and analyze the complicated social and political phenomena facing us today.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley
The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley

Author: Bertil Belfrage

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-09-21

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 1441114785

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Due to his theory of 'immaterialism' and Schopenhauer's regard of him as the 'father of idealism', George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most important thinkers of the Early Modern period. The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley is a comprehensive one volume reference guide to his life, thought and work. In twenty six original essays, a team of leading international scholars of Modern Philosophy cover all of Berkeley's writings including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, thus providing readers with a complete and accessible source of information to the entire corpus of Berkeley's writings. The book includes extended essays on key themes in Berkeley's thought as well as sections covering Berkeley's life and times, and also his intellectual influence and legacy.