It is sometimes suggested that Berkeley adheres to an empirical criterion of meaning, on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies an idea (i.e., an immediate object of perceptual experience). This criterion is thought to underlie his rejection of the term ‘matter’ as meaningless. As is well known, Berkeley thinks that it is impossible to perceive matter. If one cannot perceive matter, then, per Berkeley, one can have no idea of it; if one can have no idea (...) of it, then one cannot speak meaningfully of it. But if this is Berkeley’s position, then there is a puzzle, because Berkeley also explicitly claims that it is impossible to perceive/have ideas of minds. So if he is relying on a criterion on which terms get their meaning by referring to ideas, then, just as Berkeley rejects talk of material substance, so, too, must he reject talk of mental substance. Famously, however, Berkeley insists that there is no parity between the cases of material and mental substance. It is typically suggested that the disparity between matter and minds rests on the fact that although one cannot strictly speaking perceive minds, nonetheless Berkeley thinks that one can have experiential access to minds via reflection, and that this access allows for meaningful talk of minds. Of course, one can only have reflective experience of one’s own mind. But what of other minds, which one cannot reflectively experience? Here the usual tactic is to suppose that, although one cannot have direct reflective experience of other minds, nonetheless one can indirectly experience such minds via analogy to our own minds, and that this indirect experience grounds the meaningfulness of talk of other minds. In this paper, I argue that the reasoning behind Berkeley’s ‘likeness principle,’ that an idea can only be like another idea, can be generalized to argue against this experience-based account of our access to other minds. I claim instead that Berkeley allows for the meaningfulness of talk of other minds by expanding the criterion of meaning in a different way. I argue that Berkeley holds a criterion of meaning on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies either an object of experience or an object that one has reason to posit on the basis of experience, i.e., an object that is necessary to explain our experiences. When an object is neither experienced nor explains our experiences, then and only then is Berkeley willing to reject it as meaningless. Thus he writes of “the word matter,” that “it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us: and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about we know not what, and we know not why” (Principles, §77.) The word is not meaningless merely because we do not know what matter might be; it is meaningless because we also do not know why it should be. Correspondingly, I argue that the term ‘mind’ is meaningful because although we have no experience of minds, nonetheless they play an important role in explaining our experiences. (shrink)

Berkeley holds that objects in the world are constituted of ideas. Some commentators argue that for Berkeley, ideas are identical to acts of perception; this is taken to proceed from his view that ideas are like pains. In this paper, I evaluate the identity claim. I argue that although it does not follow from the pain analogy, nonetheless the texts suggest that Berkeley does think ideas and acts are identical. I show how Berkeley can account for objects persisting over time (...) and being perceivable by multiple observers, even if the ideas that constitute them are intermittent and dependent on particular actors. (shrink)

Berkeley didn’t write very much about his ‘philosophy of mind’ and what he did write is rather perplexing and perhaps inconsistent. The most basic problem is that it just isn’t clear what a mind (or, more accurately, a spirit) is for Berkeley. Unsurprisingly, many interpretations tend to understand Berkeleian spirit in models provided by other philosophers – interpretations in which Berkeleian spirit turns out to be a close cousin of the Cartesian ego, Lockean spiritual substratum, Lockean self, and Humean bundle (...) of perceptions. Stephen H. Daniel and I have each offered different interpretations of Berkeley that refuse to reduce Berkeley’s account of spirit to that of other canonical thinkers and, indeed, which place Berkeleian spirit in some tension with the Aristotelian‐Cartesian‐Lockean traditions. In this paper, I argue that Daniel’s account is too extreme in that it implausibly removes Berkeley from this tradition altogether. I show how my account avoids that extreme and I defend it against some objections. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that Berkeley endorses a spirit-idea dualism, and I explain what this dualism amounts to. Central to the discussion is Berkeley's claim that spirits and ideas are "entirely distinct." Taken as a Cartesian real distinction, the "entirely distinct" claim seems to be at odds with Berkeley's view that spirits are substances that support ideas by perceiving them. This has led commentators to deflate Berkeley's notion of "entire distinction" by reading it as analogous to the (...) categorical distinction between substance and accident. I argue that rather than taking Berkeley's notion of "entire distinction" in either of these ways, it ought to be understood as insisting upon a radical dissimilitude between spirits and ideas. This dissimilitude requires that ideas cannot be viewed as analogous to modes or accidents which inhere in a substance. Moreover, spirits and ideas cannot be understood in terms of a single, gradated scale of reality. Instead, for Berkeley spirits and ideas occupy two entirely different scales of reality and consequently the very term 'thing' applies to them in different senses. In this way, Berkeley endorses a severe dualism that occurs at the highest level of his ontology. En este trabajo defiendo que Berkeley sostiene un dualismo espíritu-idea y explico qué significa tal dualismo. Es central en la discusión la afirmación de Berkeley que los espíritus y las ideas son "totalmente distintos". Considerada como una distinción real cartesiana, la tesis "totalmente distintos" parece estar en tensión con la concepción de Berkeley de que los espíritus son sustancias que "support ideas by perceiving them". Esto ha llevado a los comentadores a disminuir la noción de Berkeley de "distinción total" leyéndola como un análogo a la distinción categorial entre sustancia y accidente. Yo argumento que en lugar de considerar a la noción de Berkeley de "distinción total"en alguno de esos modos, debe ser comprendida como insistiendo en una radical diferencia entre espíritus e ideas. Esta diferencia requiere que las ideas no se vean como análogas a modos o accidentes de la sustancia. Además espíritus e ideas no pueden ser entendidos en términos de una única escala graduada de realidad. En cambio para Berkeley espíritus e ideas ocupan dos escalas totalmente distintas de realidad y en consecuencia, el término mismo "cosa" se aplica en sentidos distintos. De este modo, Berkeley sostiene un dualismo severo que acaece al más alto nivel de su ontología. (shrink)