David Berman

_Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher_ (1732) is Berkeley's main work of philosophical theology and a crucial source of his views on meaning and language. This edition contains the four most important dialogues and a selection of critical essays and commentaries reflecting the response of such writers as Hutcheson, Mill and Antony Flew. The only single edition currently in print, it argues that _Alciphron_ has a more important place both in the Berkeley canon and in early modern philosophy than is generally thought.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries.

Chapter 2 is on Whately’s critique of Hume’s attack on miracles, and how far it was successful. Here I try to show that Whately’s critique was aimed at two main Humean notions which underlie Hume’s attack on miracles: (1) that the only justification for belief in matters of fact is experience or observation, rather than testimony; and (2) that the meaning of the term ‘miracle’ is an event that is improbable, rather than supernatural. Whately’s showing that (1) and (2) are mistaken forms the basis of his conclusion that Hume’s attack on miracles is as absurd as Whately’s (ironic) argument that Napoleon’s existence can be doubted.

This book examines Richard Whately's classic book Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte. After considering its textual development, the analysis focusses on Whately's idea of the 'Preliminary Question'; the idea that in the debate about Jesus's miracles there is a more basic question that has been overlooked and which invalidates the debate. It is asked whether the notion of a Preliminary Question might not illuminate other philosophical disputes. Finally, a variant of the Preliminary Question is proposed in which both positions in a dispute are shown to be true and this form of the question is invoked to shed light on the debate between metaphysical monists and dualists and to revisit the debate about miracles. This book is essential reading for all scholars of the philosophy or religion and British 19th century philosophy. It is also of interest to scholars researching David Hume and Bertrand Russell. David Berman is Fellow Emeritus of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles and 6 scholarly books.

Probably no doctrine has excited as much horror and abuse as atheism. This first history of British atheism, first published in 1987, tries to explain this reaction while exhibiting the development of atheism from Hobbes to Russell. Although avowed atheism appeared surprisingly late – 1782 in Britain – there were covert atheists in the middle seventeenth century. By tracing its development from so early a date, Dr Berman gives an account of an important and fascinating strand of intellectual history.

This chapter introduce a new and different Preliminary Question. This is where disputes show not that the disputants are all wrong but all right. Here the main dispute is between monists, such as Hobbes, and dualists such as Descartes. More specifically I try to show that the monists and dualists are both right, because they are of different basic types, with different forms of consciousness; which, I try to show, is confirmed by the history of philosophy. And this conclusion also follows, I argue, when the dispute between monists and dualists is taken into the ethical realm, where the dualists accept objective morality and the monists reject it.

This chapter is about the Preliminary Question, but extended into three areas of philosophy: (1) Draws on Bertrand Russell’s view that there is no truth in philosophy but only in the sciences. (2) Looks at the question of life after death and at the agnostic argument, according to which both those who believe in life after death and those who reject it are mistaken. (3) Is about the disputes concerning Hume’s (alleged) retraction of his theory of personal identity. For while Hume scholars believe that Hume retracted his theory, they dispute why he did so. What I try to show here is that when the Preliminary Question is asked it turns out that all the disputants are mistaken.

This chapter is about Whately’s understanding of the Preliminary Question, and the three disputes he used to illustrate it. The first illustration concerns King Charles II, the second Copernicus’s theory of falling bodies, the third is on the Moscow fire. Whately’s claim is that in all three cases, when the Preliminary Question is asked, it is found that there is no truth in any of the three disputes. This then provides the setting for the main subject of his Historic Doubts: the life and character of Napoleon, about which, as Whately shows, there has been much dispute. Whately’s (ironic) conclusion is that, when the Preliminary Question is asked, it turns out that the answer is in accord with the three illustrations: that there is no truth in the disputes about Napoleon, and for the simple reason that Napoleon did not exist.

My aim in this chapter is to look closely at A. J. Ayer, the philosopher who is the terminus of this work; then to use my understanding of him to point to a number of tangles in twentieth century philosophy and the way they can be untangled. However, first it is necessary to be clear about Ayer’s philosophical position. Nor is this an easy matter, for Ayer wrote many philosophical books and articles after his first and most celebrated work, Language, Truth and Logic [= LTL] was published in 1936, when he was twenty-six. Yet I think his position remained essentially the same even to his last essay, entitled a ‘Defense of Empiricism’, published in 1989, the year of his death. Perhaps the best way of identifying this philosophical position, as he himself suggests in that last essay, is to see what it was not, i.e. the positions which Ayer did not accept, even though he recognized they were held by respected philosophers. One such position was Berkeley’s idealism, which Ayer thought was wrong for, among the reasons, its subjectivist tendency to solipsism. Another position which Ayer thought was mistaken was representationalism, which Ayer rejects for Berkeleian reasons- in short because it supposes that what exists in a non-perceptual realm. But if we do not perceive or experience this realm or the things in it, then how can we know anything about them, or even that that they exist? Hence Ayer sees this position- which was accepted for a time by Russell, who Ayer had enormous respect for- as mistaken.

Two persons looking into a field can each say ‘I see the brown cow’ and be conscious of the cow they see. And as there is one thing they see and are talking about, namely the cow, it is assumed that their respective consciousness is also the same. This, very briefly, is what I call the Assumption: that there is one basic kind of consciousness which all human beings have. It is this Assumption which I reject. For the truth, I argue, is that there are two basic kinds of human consciousness, one which is monistic, the other dualistic. I call this the 2 Consciousnesses Theory- or, for short, 2CT. My aim in this chapter is to make clear both the Assumption and the 2CT, and to explain why the former should be rejected and the latter accepted. To do this, I move in different sections between the Assumption and the 2CT, going deeper and deeper into each, providing more and more detail about each and why one is false and the other is true.

The title is meant to indicate that consciousness is being examined largely within the history of philosophy, and within the period of time from Descartes to Ayer. Investigators aiming to understand consciousness and minds usually try to take account of all individual human minds, so as to have the most data for the most encompassing induction. The problem with that approach is that because of the vastness of the data, its results tend to be vague, lacking the specificity of studies of individuals. On the other hand, the problem with studies of individuals is that they cannot guarantee generality, as the opposing method can. This book's distinctive approach aims at a middle way, getting the best of the two opposing methods by drawing its data from the history of philosophy, especially the history of the great philosophers.

This book is about A. J. Ayer and his unusual mind, which was dramatically changed in 1988, when he had a Near Death Experience, i.e. NDE. The book is also about dreams, an area in which Ayer's unusual mind showed itself. But most important, this book is about whether there is life after bodily death. Chapter one has two parts. In part one I examine what Ayer says about his NDE; which is contained in four documents: (1) a letter he wrote to the Spectator, published on 30 July 1988 (2) an article by him published in the Sunday Telegraph on 28 August 1988; (3) an article by him published in the Spectator, 15 October 1988. All these have hitherto been available to commentators; although the first is not as well known as the other two. However, the fourth item has not been hitherto available. This is (4) a letter Ayer wrote me on 15 March 1989, which contains probably his last pronouncement on his NDE and life after death. Having examined this evidence concerning Ayer’s NDE in part one, my conclusion is that there is a puzzle, indeed a mystery, that of Ayer’s double forgetting, which I believe I solve in part two. Going further, I try to show that my solution not only gives us an insight into Ayer's unusual mind, but also bears on the extent to which Ayer's NDE offers evidence for life after death. Chapter two is on dreaming. It has three parts. Part one is on the understanding of dreams from earliest times to the present. Here I try to show that there have been four main phases: the primeval, the ancient, the modern, and the Freudian. Part two sets out what I call the 2 World Theory of dreams, or 2WT, according to which dreams constitute a second world, in addition to our material world. Here I also suggest that there is reason to believe that this second world, the dream world, is the next world, where dream selves exist, even when their material selves have died. Part three then looks again at Ayer's NDE, as described in Chapter One. It focuses on Ayer's earliest remarks to his French friend, which contain what, in Chapter One, I called the 'message'. What I try to show is that these remarks provide evidence that during his NDE Ayer was in the next world, and that he had his first visual dream, from which I think it is probable that the dream world is the next world. Chapter 3 is on the theory of reincarnation as understood and defended by Plato especially as set out at the end of the Republic in the myth of Er, and John McTaggart, which he develops in his Human Immortality and Pre-existence, 1915, which I call the core argument. I also bring in the defence of Rc by Ian Stevenson, and my own defence based on a new understanding of dementia. Following Chapter 3, there is an Epilogue which describes a new game I devised, based on draughts, which illustrates my theory in chapter two. The book also has 3 appendices, each relating to one of the three Chapters. The first prints a lecture I gave in 1988, called 'Ghosts, Souls and Immortality’, which is a wide- ranging survey of the question of life after death. But it is also relevant in that I sent a copy of it to Ayer, which he comments on his 1989 letter to me. The second appendix, on chapter 2, examines Kant’s account of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s two putative paranormal feats, which seemed to provide evidence that Swedenborg had gone in into the next world; which Kant discusses positively in his 1763 letter to Charlotte von Knobloch and then negatively, indeed scornfully, in his 1766 Dreams of a Spirit-seer. The third appendix argues that Spinoza was a believer in reincarnation, even though he does not mention it in his Ethics. The third appendix puts forward the thesis that Spinoza accepted reincarnation, even though he does not even mention it in the Ethics. As this book is mainly on life after death, I think it will be useful if I make the following points: By the death of a human being, I understand the death of the human body. But there is still the question whether something will survive. As this something is not the body, it must be what we call mind, or consciousness and what used to be called soul. So the question is: does the mind survive. I don’t think anyone KNOWS if it does. But in this book I have put forward a case that the dream mind or self might too die, but it might be survived by what is deeper than both the body and dream self, which I call the UC, and that it does so through reincarnation. This is the theory of Plato and McT. Of course the prevailing view is that this is mistaken, that there is no survival at all. I think there is no justification for this total negative certainty. I think that the prevailing view is right to criticize specific arguments and supposed evidence that something will survive, but not that survival is impossible, that oblivion must follow the death of the body. No one can know this. To be sure, it might be so. That being so, there are two possibilities: that something might survive and nothing, so oblivion. This point was put forward by Socrates in Apology. Who thought this should be re-assuring, since he thinks there is reason to think that oblivion (which can be compared to dreamless sleep) is not a bad thing.