New Interpretations of Berkeley's Thought (review)

Berkeley apologizes in the Principles for his apparent verbosity. After all, "to what purpose is it to dilate on that which may be demonstrated . . . in a line or two . . . ?" (PHK § 22). His justification for his prolixity is that "all men do not equally apprehend things of this nature; and I am willing to be understood by every one" (PHK § 34).

A willingness to be understood by everyone is surely an intellectual virtue and suggests good will on the part of an author. In this excellent collection of twelve essays, some arising from a 2003 conference commemorating the 250^th anniversary of Berkeley's death, Berkeley's good will is richly rewarded. The essays cover many topics—representation, skepticism, self-consciousness, mathematics, human agency and liberty, as well as fire and light in Berkeley's Siris. In all cases, they offer fresh readings of Berkeley's philosophy.

Several of the essays focus with fine precision on commonly discussed topics. Among these is Charles McCracken's contribution, "Berkeley's Realism." McCracken claims not that Berkeley is not a realist, but that, given a certain understanding of commonsense realism, Berkeley is not a commonsense realist. McCracken takes issue with the commonsense realist position that "things have the properties we perceive them to have, and . . . they exist, with those properties, whether we perceive them or not" (25). He holds that, for Berkeley, things surely exist whether we perceive them or not. But, he continues, things exist not with the properties we perceive them to have when we do not perceive them. They exist in different ways. McCracken's position—that the unperceived things exist in God's mind as ideas of what God decrees—has the advantage of bypassing both phenomenalism and divine sensations as solutions to the continuity problem. But it does not fully explain how a thing existing in different ways is, in fact, the same thing.

Other essays in the collection focus their attention more widely and offer new interpretative strategies, for example, "Berkeley on Self-Consciousness," by Talia Mae Bettcher, and "Berkeley's Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substance," by Stephen Daniel. Bettcher argues that Berkeley's rejection of ideas as modes of mind leads to a re-conceptualization of self-consciousness that constitutes a break with the Cartesian-Lockean tradition. The result is a bifurcated model of consciousness, a consciousness of items distinct from one's self. Daniel offers a reading of Berkeley's notion of spiritual substance more in line with the Stoics and Leibniz than with Descartes and Locke. On this view, spirit or mind is the principle or activity whereby ideas are identified, differentiated, and related to one another. Mind is not a thing, but an act. This position is to be distinguished, according to Daniel, from a Humean view of mind as a bundle of already differentiated ideas. On Daniel's reading of Berkeley, minds do not have ideas; minds are the acts of differentiation and identification of ideas and their relations.

Both of these essays invite more questions than they can reasonably be expected to answer in a collection such as this. As with any new interpretive structure, issues regarded as standard require analysis within the new context. To their credit, these two authors offer some suggestions with respect to their positions on a few standard problems, including the awareness of oneself as an agent, the continued existence of objects, and the unity of a mind. But for fuller discussions of their views, one must look elsewhere.

A third category of essays demonstrates the philosophical import of works receiving somewhat less attention by contemporary scholars. One example is Douglas Jesseph's "Faith and Fluxions: Berkeley on Theology and Mathematics." The question here is why mystery is acceptable in theological matters but not in scientific ones. Jesseph discusses Berkeley's rejection, in The Analyst, of the horn-tooting Newtonian mathematicians who regard the doctrine of fluxions as superior (because grounded in concepts of motion and velocity) to Leibnizian infinitesimals. According...