Literary Criticism (1400-1800) | Berkeley, George - John Foster (essay date 1985)

John Foster (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: “Berkeley on the Physical World,” in Essays on Berkeley: A Tercentennial Celebration, edited by John Foster and Howard Robinson, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 83-108.

[In the following essay, Foster examines two apparently contradictory views in Berkeley's philosophy: that all reality exists solely in the mind and that a physical world does indeed exist and follows set laws.]

I

Berkeley's philosophy of the physical world is built around two central claims. The first is his claim that reality is ultimately purely mental, consisting solely of minds (spirits) and what exists or occurs within them. The second is his claim that there is a physical world and one which (more or less) answers to the specifications of our ordinary beliefs. These two claims appear to be incompatible: it seems that to accept the existence of a physical world, with its three-dimensional space and its solid...

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