This original new work takes a sharply focused look at Berkeley's ontology and provides a fuller understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand, Berkeley's nominalism and antiabstractionism and, on the other, his principal arguments for idealism and his attempts to square his idealism with common sense. Drawing heavily on detailed textual analysis, historical context, and careful examination of the work of other scholars, Muehlmann challenges, modifies, rejects, and exploits some well-established interpretations of Berkeley's philosophy.

This paper consists of a thorough examination of the russell-Wittgenstein controversy over identity. The early wittgenstein's comments on this issue are cryptic and obscure; yet one thing is obvious. His views on identity are partly, If not wholly a negative response to russell's. In unearthing the source of the controversy, I distinguish several senses of 'identity'. I then examine several texts of russell's showing that he fails to make these necessary distinctions. I conclude by demonstrating that wittgenstein's comments are designed (...) in part to rectify this mistake and in part to offer an illuminating analysis of his own. (shrink)

This collection of fourteen interpretative essays on the philosophy of George Berkeley focuses specifically on Berkeley’s theory of the nature and variety of existing things. The collection is notable for containing the first four winners of the Turbayne International Berkeley Essay Prize. The seven essays in the first part, entitled “Idealism,” attempt to illuminate Berkeley’s notorious thesis that to be is to be perceived, that the _esse_ of sensible things is _percipi._ Most of the essays in this first part are (...) either direct or indirect responses to an influential interpretation of Berkeley’s idealism advanced thirty years ago by Edwin B. Allaire. The second part, “Volition, Action, and Causation,” contains four essays focusing on Berkeley’s volitionism, on his thesis that only the activities of minds are causally efficacious. “Vision and the Perceptual Objects,” the third part of the volume, deals with Berkeley’s theory of vision and his doctrine that all of the objects of perception depend on God’s will for their existence. (shrink)

Berkeley's idealism consists of the following claims. Objects such as chairs, apples, mountains, and our bodies are combinations of sensible qualities. Sensible qualities and combinations of such are ideas or sensations. In the philosophical sense of ‘substance’ there is no such entity as a substance. There are minds which perceive and will: When a mind perceives it has sensations or ideas; and when a mind wills it produces or causes sensations or ideas. These claims are grounded in the ontological and (...) epistemological framework of assumptions, distinctions and arguments informing Berkeley's doctrine that esse est percipi aut percipere. The purpose of this paper is to explore and expose the main features of that framework.What is the ontological force and import on Berkeley's claim that esse est percipi? One influential recent suggestion1 is this: Berkeley holds that material substances do not exist, the analysis of sensible things yields nothing but sensible qualities, minds are mental substances and no sensible quality or collection of sensible qualities can exist without inhering in some substance. (shrink)