Stephen H. Daniel

Since nothing about God is passive, and the perception of pain is inherently passive, then it seems that God does not know what it is like to experience pain. Nor would he be able to cause us to experience pain, for his experience would then be a sensation (which would require God to have senses, which he does not). My suggestion is that Berkeley avoids this situation by describing how God knows about pain “among other things” (i.e. as something whose identity is intelligible in terms of the integrated network of things). This avoids having to assume that God has ideas (including pain) apart from his willing that there be perceivers who have specific ideas that are in harmony or not in harmony with one another.

RésuméLes discussions autour de George Berkeley rejettent souvent les remarques de ses Notebooks selon lesquelles (1) les corps sont des pouvoirs qui amènent les percepteurs à avoir des pensées et (2) les corps existent même lorsqu'ils ne sont pas perçus. J'ai déjà noté ces affirmations, mais je n'ai pas expliqué comment les corps sont infiniment liés en tant que pensées (à distinguer des idées), et Melissa Frankel traite les corps comme des archétypes perçus individuellement par Dieu, mais n'explique pas comment ils sont individués. Je soutiens que, parce que les corps identifient les objets uniquement pour des esprits finis, ils sont des pouvoirs dérivés par lesquels les objets individués sont liés les uns aux autres de manière infinie.

For Descartes, our minds are not natural causes because they are not themselves objects; rather, they are the activities that identify objects. In short, they are our challenges to the natural order of things, both in how we adapt to novel situations (as exhibited in what has been called the “rational action test”) and in how we respond in unexpected yet appropriate ways to linguistic cues (in the “language test”). Because these tests reveal ways in which our minds (as “pure,” creative, willful, and immortal substances) introduce novelty into nature, we are not determined (as animals are) by other objects. That is, our rational or linguistic activities are challenges to the order of nature precisely because they are not part of, but rather constitute, nature. Accordingly, “real” (creative) speech is logically prior to finite differentiations and is not limited by laws of nature that constrain animal behavior.

This book is a study of the philosophy of the early 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. It does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, the book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in a manner that transforms the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights--for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects--are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

Berkeley’s appeal to a posteriori arguments for God’s existence supports belief only in a God who is finite. But by appealing to an a priori argument for God’s existence, Berkeley emphasizes God’s infinity. In this latter argument, God is not the efficient cause of particular finite things in the world, for such an explanation does not provide a justification or rationale for why the totality of finite things would exist in the first place. Instead, God is understood as the creator of the total unity of all there is, the whole of creation. In this a priori argument, we should not focus on the specific objects that God creates, for that requires that we think that God knows each finite thing as distinct from every other. Rather, we should recognize how God creates all things in creating the complex, infinite totality of finite perceivings, each of which exists in virtue of the distinctions and relations it expresses.

Jonathan Edwards' marginalization in modern philosophy stems from his refusal to endorse the predicational logic and substantialist ontology of the rationalist-empiricist debate. Instead, he appeals to a communicative, semiotic logic of propositions grounded in Stoic thought and thematized by Peter Ramus and his Puritan followers. That alternative logic displays an "ontology of supposition" that guarantees God's existence, justifies typological, magical, and even astrological inferences, undermines modernist dichotomies (e.g., between mind and matter), and invalidates efforts to speak of Edwards' thought in terms of idealism or immaterialism.

Though some of the critical reviews of Frank M. Coleman's Hobbes and America have alluded to the affinities of his work to that of Strauss, Macpherson, Laslett, and Oakeshott, most have ignored Coleman's specifically philosophic treatment of Hobbes as the foundational thinker most responsive to political realities which emerge in the seventeenth century and still characterize American politics. Coleman's purpose is to demonstrate how the operative American constitutional philosophy can be recognized clearly only when understood in the context of its Hobbesian origins. But, Coleman suggests, this does not necessarily exclude the possibility of gaining insight into the thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Madison in virtue of reflection on contemporary American political experience.

In his post-1720 works, Berkeley focuses his comments about Descartes on mechanism and about Locke on general abstract ideas. He warns against using metaphysical principles to explain observed regularities, and he extends his account to include spiritual substances (including God). Indeed, by calling a substance a spirit, he emphasizes how a person is simply the will that ideas be differentiated and associated in a certain way, not some thing that engages in differentiation. In this sense, a substance cannot be conceived apart from its activity.

As central as the notion of mind is for Berkeley, it is not surprising that what he means by mind stirs debate. At issue are questions about not only what kind of thing a mind is but also how we can know it. This convergence of ontological and epistemological interests in discussing mind has led some commentators to argue that Berkeley's appeal to the Cartesian vocabulary of 'spiritual substance' signals his appropriation of elements of Descartes's theory of mind. But in his account of spiritual substance, Berkeley focuses much more than Descartes on the intrinsic relation between mind and its ideas and less on the nature of mind as such. This makes it difficult to justify the claim that mind is...

Berkeley argues that claims about divine predication (e.g., God is wise or exists) should be understood literally rather than analogically, because like all spirits (i.e., causes), God is intelligible only in terms of the extent of his effects. By focusing on the harmony and order of nature, Berkeley thus unites his view of God with his doctrines of mind, force, grace, and power, and avoids challenges to religious claims that are raised by appeals to analogy. The essay concludes by showing how a letter, supposedly by Berkeley, to Peter Browne ("discovered" in 1969 by Berman and Pittion) is, in fact, by John Jackson (1686-1763), controversial theologian and friend of Samuel Clarke.

In this set of previously unpublished essays, noted scholars from North America and Europe describe how the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1684-1753) continues to inspire debates about his views on knowledge, reality, God, freedom, mathematics, and religion. Here discussions about Berkeley's account of physical objects, minds, and God's role in human experience are resolved within explicitly ethical and theological contexts. This collection uses debates about Berkeley's immaterialism and theory of ideas to open up a discussion of how divine activity and human experience are reconciled in a recurring appeal to the laws of nature. In that context, objects in the world are linked to one another by means of the perceptions and affections whereby minds come into being. The laws of nature thus become crucial for Berkeley in revealing how objects are unintelligible apart from being apprehended by minds that are themselves connected to one another in virtue of their ideas. Overall, the essays indicate that, for Berkeley, our apprehension of the world as real depends on recognizing how the world expressed by our ideas is not a mere aggregate of disconnected bodies but is rather an integrated unity of the things we experience. This provides an antidote against the loss of unity created by Descartes' isolation of the self from nature and Locke's account of objects in terms of simple, discrete ideas. In juxtaposing discussions of Berkeley's later writings with his earlier works, this volume shows not only how, for Berkeley, mind is intrinsically linked to things in nature as the principle of their determination in law-governed ways, but also how minds are practically related to the objects of the physical world, one another, and ultimately God.