Jonathan Dancy

This new introduction to the main themes of Berkeley's philosophy assumes no previous knowlege of philosophy and will be accessible to first-year students and to the interested general reader. It also offers and defends its own interpretation of Berkeley' position. Jonathan Dancy argues that we understand Berkeley's idealism best if we take seriously his claim that realism (the view that material things have an existence independent of the mind) derives from a mistaken use of abstraction. Stress is laid on Berkelye's determination to use idealism to bring his God as close to us as possible. Instances of this are his claims that the world we live in is a collection of ideas in God's mind, and that natural events are divine utterances which science is the attempts to interpret. Dancy also discusses Berkelye's attack on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and his views on perception and knowledge. There is an account of his theory of the mind and of the nature of human action, and a final chapter contrasts the interpretation offered here with others. Students who have read this book will be well equipped to understand and assess the frequent references to Berkeley in current literature.

Lecture 13 discusses the problem of freedom. Can there be a free event? Strawson supposes this is not logically impossible even though the truth of ‘every event is caused’ is analytic. The notion of causal impossibility is a pseudo-notion. There is only the logical impossibility that a causal law should be true despite a contrary instance. Strawson proposes that the sense of moral responsibility is the reflective consciousness of the experience of obligation, guilt, and remorse, coupled with the awareness in ourselves of motives whose conflict issues in experiences of obligation, guilt, and remorse.

Lecture 12 addresses the nature of moral judgements. Actual experience of the specifically moral emotions is the source of all our moral categories. Strawson discusses the ideal of a fully developed moral sensibility, the analogy between ‘water tends to run downhill’ and ‘Promise-keeping tends to be right’. Strawson discusses the idea that ideal moral judgements are analogous to the statements of pure/applied science. It is argued that general moral judgements are not expressions of emotion, but can be analysed in terms of an ideal type of feeling. They all admit of exceptions.

Lecture 11 addresses the question of how we come to have the ideas expressed by ‘good’, ‘right’, and so on. They are defined in terms of the fundamental moral experiences of guilt, approval, and disapproval. Strawson distinguishes between real and verbal knowledge: real knowledge requires experience of obligation, guilt, approval, disapproval. General moral knowledge is based on experience; but there are always exceptions to moral generalisations, except to the rule that what I feel morally obliged to do is right. General moral propositions should be of the form: ‘acts of this type tend as such to be right/wrong’. Strawson discusses Broad on the materially right and the formally right. Objections to moral intuitionism are presented: (1) the absence of introspective evidence, (2) fallibility argument, (3) connection between moral concepts, (4) motivation argument, (5) subjective duty argument, (6) necessary connexion, (7) exceptions and tendencies to be right.