Embodiment is a fact of human existence which philosophers should not ignore. They may differ to a great extent in what they have to say about our bodies, but they have to take into account that for each of us our body has a special status, it is not merely one amongst the physical objects, but a physical object to which we have a unique relation. While Descartes approached the issue of embodiment through consideration of sensation and imagination, it is (...) more directly reached by consideration of action and agency: whenever we act upon the world, we act by moving our bodies. So if we can understand what an immaterialist such as Berkeley thinks about agency, we will have gone a fair way to understanding what he thinks about embodiment. §1 discusses a recent flurry of articles on the subject of Berkeley’s account of action. I choose to present Berkeley as a causal-volitional theorist not because I think it is the uniquely correct interpretation of the texts, but because I find it more philosophically interesting as a version of immaterialism. In particular, it raises the possibility of a substantive account of human embodiment which is completely unavailable to the occasionalist. §2 articulates an apparent philosophical problem for Berkeley qua causal-volitional theorist and show that Locke was aware of a related problem and had a solution of which Berkeley would have known. §3 distinguishes two interpretations of Berkeley’s famous denial of blind agency – as the assertion of a weak representational condition or a strong epistemic one – and provide evidence that there was a well-established debate about blind powers in the seventeenth century which took the metaphor of blindness as indicating an epistemic rather than merely representational failing. What remains to do in §4 is to consider whether Berkeley, with his own peculiar commitments, could in fact accept this account of agency. (shrink)

It is well known that the French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was both an occasionalist in metaphysics and a mechanist in physics. He consistently argued that God is the only true caus...

Contemporary Humeans treat laws of nature as statements of exceptionless regularities that function as the axioms of the best deductive system. Such ‘Best System Accounts’ marry realism about laws with a denial of necessary connections among events. I argue that Hume’s predecessor, George Berkeley, offers a more sophisticated conception of laws, equally consistent with the absence of powers or necessary connections among events in the natural world. On this view, laws are not statements of regularities but the most general rules (...) God follows in producing the world. Pace most commentators, I argue that Berkeley’s view is neither instrumentalist nor reductionist. More important, the Berkeleyan Best System can solve some of the problems afflicting its Humean rivals, including the problems of theory choice and Nancy Cartwright’s ‘facticity’ dilemma. Some of these solutions are available in the contemporary context, without any appeal to God. Berkeley’s account deserves to be taken seriously in its own right. (shrink)

Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object (...) and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's solution to these problems lies in his views about language. At one level, human language allows us to exploit patterns in our perceptions to construct a highly structured representation of the physical world which allows us to make accurate predictions at minimal cognitive expense. At a deeper level, these patterns occur in perception because our perceptions themselves form a language in which God speaks to us. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Philonous: You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards, in a round column, to a certain height, at which it breaks ...

Presents Newton's unifying idea of gravitation and explains how he converted physics from a science of explanation into a general mathematical system.

Demonstrating that in George Berkeley's last major work, Siris, Berkeley had converted to a belief in the usefulness of the concept and existence of minute particles, Moked here posits that Berkeley developed a highly original brand of corpuscularian physics.

Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object (...) and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's solution to these problems lies in his views about language. At one level, human language allows us to exploit patterns in our perceptions to construct a highly structured representation of the physical world which allows us to make accurate predictions at minimal cognitive expense. At a deeper level, these patterns occur in perception because our perceptions themselves form a language in which God speaks to us. (shrink)