Precognition of Ep. 89: Berkeley’s Idealism

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1. Zane Lucow says

   September 4, 2016 at 3:20 pm

   Hi guys! I loved the show, but the reading of Berkeley’s master argument seemed uncharitable. There are two ways to read it. One in which he is stating that conceiving of an object is by its nature equal to perceiving it. Such a view is consistent with his system, but it is circular and unpersuasive, because you can’t conflate imagination with reality until you accept that the only things that exist are minds and ideas. As such, it hardly supports the assertion that the only things that exist are minds and ideas. That seems to be the reading that you have here. The second is that when one conceives of an object they impose upon it all of the qualities of a perception. According to this reading, the reason that it is impossible to conceive of an object existing unperceived is not that conception and perception are the same, but rather that it is impossible to conceive of an object without also conceiving the properties of sense perception. So, for example, if I asked you to picture a book in a room with no one perceiving it, you could easily do that. However, when you do that you are conceiving it from a particular angle, coating it with particular colors, and scaling the object to the size of the room in a particular way. All of these are properties of sense perception, and no matter how you twist the camera of your minds eye, or change the colors of the object perceived, you are necessarily imposing the properties of a person experiencing the book through the senses. The question is whether you can conceive of an object in a room without imposing any sensible qualities on it. That seems to me a much harder task. I do not know which version Berkeley intended, partly because this is an area of the text in which he is frustratingly imprecise, but whichever version he meant, this second reading serves the same role in his master argument, and it would be interesting to see how you respond to the more charitable version of the argument. Anyway, I enjoy the work. Keep it up!

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