Berkley an Interpretation

ISBN-13: 9780198249078 / Angielski / Twarda / 1989 / 336 str.

Kenneth Winkler

Opis

David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments 'admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no distance apart from the spirits who transmit and receive it. Kenneth P. Winkler presents these conclusions as natural (though by no means inevitable) consequences of Berkeley's reflections on such topics as representation, abstraction, necessary truth, and cause and effect. In the closing chapters Professor Winkler offers new interpretations of Berkeley's view on unperceived objects, corpuscularian science, and our knowledge of God and other minds.

Recenzje

There are several striking things about Winkler's book. One is that he does not directly address Berkeley's immaterialism until Chapter 6 ... One is struk too by Winkler's impressive scholarship. He is not only au courant with the issues he discusses, but is fully able to place them in their 17th and 18th century context.