Berkeley

George Berkeley is famous for his metaphysical doctrine that matter does not exist; that the sensations we take to be caused by an independent external world are instead caused by God. Winkler offers an interpretation and assessment of the arguments Berkeley gives in defence of this doctrine, and places it in the context of his thought as a whole. David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments `admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no existence apart from the spirits who transmit and receive it. Kenneth P. Winkler presents these conclusions as natural (though by no means inevitable) consequences of Berkeley's reflections on such topics as representation, abstraction, necessary truth, and cause and effect. In the closing chapters Proefssor Winkler offers new interpretations of Berkeley's view on unperceived objects, corpuscularian science, and our knowledge of God and other minds.