Stephen H. Daniel

Berkeley's doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the 16th-century logician Peter Ramus and his 17th-century followers (e.g., Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. This article summarizes the central features of Ramism, indicates how Berkeley adapts Ramist concepts and strategies, and chronicles Ramism's pervasiveness in Berkeley's education, especially at Trinity College Dublin.

For Berkeley, a thing's existence 'esse' is nothing more than its being perceived 'as that thing'. It makes no sense to ask (with Samuel Johnson) about the 'esse' of the mind or the specific act of perception, for that would be like asking what it means for existence to exist. Berkeley's "existere is percipi or percipere" (NB 429) thus carefully adopts the scholastic distinction between 'esse' and 'existere' ignored by Locke and others committed to a substantialist notion of mind. Following the Stoics, Berkeley proposes that, 'as' the existence of ideas, minds "subsist" rather than "exist" and, accordingly, cannot be identified as independently existing things.

For decades Continental theorists from Derrida to Deleuze have engaged in provocative, penetrating, and often extensive examinations of modern philosophers-studies that have opened up new ways to think about figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. This volume, for the first time, gives this work its due. A systematic rereading of early modern philosophers in the light of recent Continental philosophy, it exposes overlooked but critical aspects of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century philosophy even as it brings to light certain historical assumptions that have colored-and distorted-our understanding of modernist thought. This volume thus retrieves modern thinkers from the modernistic ways in which they have been portrayed since the nineteenth century at the same time, it enhances our view of the roots and concerns of current Continental thought. What claims does the early modern period have on contemporary philosophy? How have recent theorists engaged this material, and why? In answer, some of these essays explore how major Continental theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze, Le Doeuff, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Althusser explicate the ideas of classical modern thinkers others draw on recent Continental insights to examine the doctrines of modern philosophers beginning with Machiavelli and ending with Kant. Together they show how current Continental theory reinvigorates the study of the history of modern philosophers by transforming not only how we interpret their answers to certain questions, but also how we understand the very nature of these questions.

Berkeley's immaterialism has more in common with views developed by Henry More, the mathematician Joseph Raphson, John Toland, and Jonathan Edwards than those of thinkers with whom he is commonly associated (e.g., Malebranche and Locke). The key for recognizing their similarities lies in appreciating how they understand St. Paul's remark that in God "we live and move and have our being" as an invitation to think to God as the space of discourse in which minds and ideas are identified. This way of speaking about God, adapted by Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, opens up new ways to think about the relation between God and finite minds.

Commentators have not said much regarding Berkeley and Stoicism. Even when they do, they generally limit their remarks to Berkeley’s Siris (1744) where he invokes characteristically Stoic themes about the World Soul, “seminal reasons,” and the animating fire of the universe. The Stoic heritage of other Berkeleian doctrines (e.g., about mind or the semiotic character of nature) is seldom recognized, and when it is, little is made of it in explaining his other doctrines (e.g., immaterialism). None of this is surprising, considering how Stoics are considered arch-materialists and determinists. My aim is to suggest that our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophy is improved significantly by acknowledging its underlying Stoic character. I argue that Berkeley proposes not only a semantic ontology based on assumptions of Stoic logic but also a doctrine in which perceptions or ideas are intelligible precisely because they are always embedded in the propositions of a discourse or language.

Vico's historicist claims (1) that different ages are intelligible only in their own terms and (2) that the certainty and authority of history depend on its narrative formulation seem at odds with his doctrines of ideal eternal history and divine providence. He resolves these issues, however, in his treatment of ideal eternal history by using the distinction between the certain and the true to show how rhetorical expression generates meaning in and as history. Specifically, by appealing to an ontology that informs the propositional logic of the early Stoics and the ideas of Peter Ramus and his followers, Vico treats historical events as legal pronouncements and grammatical reformations of syntax. In this way he displaces the predicate logic of ancient and modern thinkers who treat rhetoric as a mere embellishment of argumentation.

By focusing on the exchange between Descartes and Hobbes on how the self is related to its activities, Berkeley draws attention to how he and Hobbes explain the forensic constitution of human subjectivity and moral/political responsibility in terms of passive obedience and conscientious submission to the laws of the sovereign. Formulated as the language of nature or as pronouncements of the supreme political power, those laws identify moral obligations by locating political subjects within those networks of sensible signs. When thus juxtaposed with Hobbes, Berkeley can be understood as endorsing a theologically inflected version of deontological ethics in which moral laws are linked directly to the constitution of the self.

Descartes’ “natural light” has been interpreted as a faculty of the mind, the sense-imagination-reason-under-standing composite, the principle of intellectual integrity and growth, or even God himself. In Meditations III and IV in particular, the meaning of lumen natural depends on recognizing how light and nature define one another and how “my nature” serves as the basis for pointing to what is beyond the domain of natural reason, including religious faith and natural belief (especially regarding morality).

For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley's notion of mind differs from Locke's in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, Berkeley redefines what it means for the mind to be a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of 17th century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. This view of mind, I conclude, is definitely not the bundle theory that some critics have portrayed it as being.