Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism by I. C. Tipton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 409 Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. By I. C. TIPTON. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1974. This book was very difficult to review, partly because Professor Tipton seems at times to be writing for the professional Berkeley scholar, and at others for the intermediate Berkeley student. He sometimes states the theses he is going to examine in misleading ways. For example: . . . (Berkeley) committed himself to the negative thesis that there is no material reality . . . (and) the positive thesis that sensible objects are just mind-dependent sensations. We all know that Berkeley never denied the existence of material reality, only material substance, and that if one seriously considers what he says about God, as Tipton belatedly tries to do in his eighth chapter, it is at best misleading to say that Berkeley thought objects to be " just minddependent sensations" (my italics), since for Berkeley God has no sensations . He spends inordinate amounts of time examining theses which, from a philosophical point of view, seem to me to be either uninteresting, or unimportant, or both. For example, he takes many pages (all of one chapter and parts of others) to examine the question of whether Berkeley is justified in characterizing his view as " common sense," which Tipton takes to mean "in accordance with the common man's views," whatever they are. Berkeley students will recognize of course that Berkeley's claim to "speak with the vulgar" is just that; and that further, he pretends to speak with the vulgar about only a narrow range of subjects, and not in philosophical depth. He does not pretend that philosophy is either obvious or simple-minded. He does not pretend to speak or to think with the vulgar about God, (aside from his "necessary" proof for His existence), or about scientific explanations, the refutation of material substance, causality, motion, notions, (including relations), mathematics, vision, and a plethora of other things. Nor does Berkeley depend, in any place I can find, upon agreement with received vulgar opinion alone to support a philosophical point. It is of passing interest, I suppose, that he thought the contemporary ordinary man would find the doctrines of material substance and abstract general ideas foolish; but this is not why Berkeley rejects either theory, and for the philosopher the philosophical is the issue. Tipton has a tendency from time to time to accept unusual or controversial positions too easily. One example which comes to mind is his acceptance of the claim that Locke took material substance rather lightly. He characterizes Locke's position as his"... case against taking substance too seriously." But surely it is one thing, Yolton and Warnock notwithstanding , to claim as Locke does that we can know nothing much about material substance except to say that it exists and must exist, and quite 410 BOOK REVIEWS another to say that we should not take it too seriously. Indeed, given that Locke thinks it essential for explaining reality, given that continuity is explained in terms of it, that the causal origin of our ideas is too, that we supposedly have an abstract general idea of it, and that it plays an essential part in the theory of material powers, one would think the thesis centrally important to Locke's metaphysics, if not to his epistemology. This carelessness is reflected in other misleading statements purporting to represent Berkeley's position. He implies that Berkeley "... dispensed with material things altogether," (page 5~) which he did not, and in another place (page 11~) he takes Berkeley's claim that ... it (is) a manifest contradiction, that any sensible object should be immediately perceived by sight or touch, and at the same time have no existence in Nature, since the very existence of an unthinking being consists in being perceived to be used by Berkeley as support for the claim that"... when I perceive something (though not necessarily by sense) I can be sure that is exists (though not necessarily in nature)." But surely even a superficial examination of the passage and the context in which it occurs (Principles 86-9~) provides no evidence of this whatsoever. Sometimes it is difficult to know whether the misleading nature of some of Tipton's assertions...