12 July 2004 Lecture Summary

Philosophers Examined: Berkeley, Witherspoon, Shepherd, esp. Berkeley.

Line of Thought: Today's lecture was on the general force of Berkeley's critique of materialist theories. I argued that what Berkeley primarily criticizes in these theories is what he sees as an attempt to make an illicit - in fact, inconsistent - distinction between what seems to be the case and what really is the case. While Berkely does allow for some appearance/reality distinction, it is a distinction between two sorts of appearances (or, to put it another way, two sorts of realities). Berkeley's argument, therefore, has force against any philosophical account of the external world, bodies, or the universe, that denies the following proposition: The things that we actually see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are the very things that are real. It is common to make distinctions between the world we sense and the world that is really there; but if Berkeley's critique stands (no one has yet provided a solid refutation of it), all these are illegitimate. The example we used to elucidate this was the brain-in-a-vat argument for skepticism, which Berkeley's critique would eliminate along with most sources of skepticism about the external world.

We then looked briefly at two critiques, one by John Witherspoon, the other by Lady Mary Shepherd, and discussed how Berkeley would answer them. The Witherspoon critique can be found here. Lady Mary Shepherd's critique can be found in the Shepherd selection in Margaret Atherton's excellent little anthology, Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period.

Activity: To review, students played a game of Berkeley Cards; the winning card for the class was the Succulent Ice Cream Cone card: A succulent ice cream cone is, for Berkeley, nothing but a patterned collection of sensible qualities (taste, smell, texture, etc.). While playing Berkeley Cards, we listened to the first half of Handel's Messiah, which was composed in Berkeley's lifetime and which he might have heard in its first performance in Dublin. Why? Just because we could.

Further Information: For more information about the brain-in-a-vat argument, plus a response to it that has similarities to Berkeley's response to materialism, see David Chalmers's readable paper, "The Matrix as Metaphysics". Chalmers says he disagrees with Berkeley's reasoning, but it seems to me he only considers one of Berkeley's lines of reasoning. Remember that Berkeley, as a Grand Master of philosophical argumentation, almost always runs more than one. The big difference between Berkeley and Chalmers is that Berkeley would think that Chalmers's response, if consistently applied, undermines all alternatives to immaterialism. But their proposals are very similar. The reason Chalmers diverges from Berkeley is that he (for unspecified reasons) doesn't find the view that "appearance is reality" plausible. I'm not sure what he means by this.