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Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs
This volume focuses on Berkeley's doctrine of signs. The 'doctrine of signs' refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as 'signs' of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions - such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of Vision in 1710, to those works written towards the end of life, including Alciphron in 1732, Berkeley is at pains to emphasise the crucial role that sign-usage, particularly (but not only) in language, plays in human life. Berkeley also...
The Metaphysics of Laws of Nature
It can seem obvious that we live in a world governed by laws of nature, yet it was not until the seventeenth century that the concept of a law came to the fore. Ever since, it has been attended by controversy: what does it mean to say that Boyle's law governs the expansion of a gas, or that the planets obey the law of gravity? Laws are rules that permit calculations and predictions. What does the universe have to be like, if it is to play by them? This book sorts the most prominent answers into three families. Laws first arose in a theological context; they govern events only because God enforces them. Those wishing to reverse the order of explanation, and argue that the powers of objects fi...
Mary Shepherd
"This guide leads readers systematically through the arguments of Mary Shepherd's two books. Chapters 1-4 cover the arguments in the Essay Upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824), where Shepherd argues that causal principles can be known by reason to be necessary truths and that causal inferences can be rationally justified. Shepherd's primary target in this work is Hume, but she also addresses the views of Thomas Brown and William Lawrence. Shepherd considered her second book, Essays on the Perception of an External Universe, and Other Subjects Connected with the Doctrine of Causation (1827), to be an extension of the earlier project on causation; here she appeals to the causal princip...
George Berkeley
A comprehensive intellectual biography of the Enlightenment philosopher In George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. From his early brilliance as a student and fellow at Trinity College Dublin to his later years as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley brought his searching and powerful intellect to bear on the full range of eighteenth-century thought and experience. Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley’s life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without ...
Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant
This addresses the transformations of metaphysics as a discipline, the emergence of analytical mechanics, the diverging avenues of 18th-century Newtonianism, the body-mind problem, and philosophical principles of classification in the life sciences. An appendix contains a critical edition and first translation into English of Newton's scholia from David Gregory's Estate on the Propositions IV through IX Book III of his Principia.
Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy
In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux’s letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous others including psychologists and cognitive scientists today. Does such a question represent a philosophical puzzle or a problem that can be solved by experimental tests? Can vision be fully restored after blindness? What i...
A Pluralist’s Guide to Solving Molyneux’s Problem
This book presents a novel pluralist strategy for answering Molyneux’s 300+-year-old conundrum: Would a person, born blind but given sight, identify a shape previously known only by their touch? The author interweaves historical scholarship with contemporary philosophical work and empirical research on animal, infant, and adult human perception. The author argues that we need a new approach to Molyneux’s problem because we do not know what the problem is really about, and it is untestable because a Molyneux subject cannot be physically realized. He criticizes Molyneux’s question for its simplistic taxonomy of "the blind" that groups significant individual differences into a singular on...
George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy
Stephen Daniel presents a study of the philosophy of George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, focusing on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. For Berkeley, mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. Daniel shows how Berkeley transformed the issues with which he engaged.
Religious Experience Revisited
Religious Experience Revisited explores a dilemma which has haunted the study of religion since William James. Is religion rooted in experiences? Is religion rooted in expressions? How are experiences and expressions related? The contributors to this international and interdisciplinary compilation explore the possibilities and the impossibilities of a hermeneutics of religion. Combining theology and philosophy with biblical, cultural, historical and literary studies, they examine how religious experiences and religious expressions have been entangled in the past and in the present. These entanglements call for interdisciplinary conversations in which those who study experiences and those who study expressions can learn from each other in order to carve out important and instructive spaces for the study of religion.
