Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and: Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 433 conceptions) are like their objects. Finally, there are brief discussions of Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards. This is an excellent book; it is written with clarity and grace. It can be read either as an introduction to Malebranche's philosophy or as a critical exposition of Malebranche 's influence on a number of British philosophers. One reason the study of Malebranche is important is that it provides a way of understanding certain features of Descartes' thought. Intentionality and the 'aboutness' of concepts are contemporary issues with roots in, e.g., Suarez, Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld. Malebranche 's effort to emphasize a certain strand in Descartes' thought, the nature of ideas and concepts and their acquisition, is one of the most remarkable developments in the history of philosophy. McCracken makes a major contribution to our understanding of that strand. HARRY M. BRACKEN McGill University John W. Yolton. Thinking Matter: Materialismin Eighteenth-CenturyBritain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp. xiv + 238. $29.5o, cloth; $12.95, paper. John W. Yolton. PerceptualAcquaintancefrom Descartesto Reid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, x984. Pp. x + 248. $32.5o, cloth; $13.95, paper. Reid and Rorty deplore Descartes' epistemic turn in philosophy on the grounds that scepticism results from perception by way of representative ideas that stand between knowers and objects known. Locke is popularly said to bring this way of ideas to catastrophe by claiming that ideas and sensations are equally caused by external objects, but that ideas represent objects by resembling them while sensations do not, and this leads to such uncertainty about the real essences of things that the maw opens on the heretical prospect that matter might think. In Thinking Matter and Perceptual Acquaintance, John Yolton presents a radical interpretation of the way of ideas from Descartes to Reid. He argues that other than a number of materialists and Malebranche, no important figure held that representative ideas are immediately known ontological entities that provide only mediate and uncertain knowledge of external objects. Yolton presents Arnauld as giving the clearest interpretation of the Cartesian idea as a cognitive or psychological act of perceptual acquaintance, an act that is intentional or meaningful or has signification or understandable content in itself. This act is cognitive per se. And while the act might be caused by material motions in the world (physiological in the human body), Yolton insists that the cognitive content (what Descartes calls objective reality) of the act is not an effect, but rather is a significatory response, a semantic function, a psychological occurrence of interpretation in which meaning or cognitive content is crucial, is provided by the perceiver, and is non-ontic. Ontologically, an idea is an act of perceptual acquaintance in which an object is directly apprehended; the epistemological aspect of this act--its cognitive content--is what Yolton claims Descartes, Arnauld, 434 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 93:3 JULY 1985 Locke, Berkeley, and Hume really mean by the term idea. This content is not ontologically separable from the act itself. Yolton thus sees his study as one of the "deontologizing of ideas" from Descartes to Reid, based on two moves, those of seeing "that having ideas [is] the same as 'perceived, conceived, understood, or known'." Yolton goes on to conclude: Both moves point to the conscious, cognitive, and semantic features of perceptual awareness. 'Representation' may still be a term to apply to such awareness, to the contents of that awareness , but that label should no longer carry the association of that other metaphor, 'the veil of perception'. If the skepticism about the external world which Reid saw in the way-of-ideas tradition was traced, as he did, to ideas being proxy objects, third things, then, in revising the standard reading of that tradition in the light of what we have discovered, such skepticism should also disappear. Attention can then be directed toward the more important component in accounts of perceptual acquaintance, the meaning and significatoryresponse. Attention can also be given to the cognitive processes that were so prevalent in this tradition, to what Hume characterized as 'acts of the mind'. (PerceptualAcquaintance, ~21) Yolton's two books form a unit in that...