Berkeley, George - Robert G. Muehlmann (essay date 1995)
Robert G. Muehlmann (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: “The Substance of Berkeley's Philosophy,” in Berkeley's Metaphysics: Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays, edited by Robert G. Muehlmann, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 89-105.
[In the following essay, Muehlmann thoroughly analyzes Berkeley's central metaphysical doctrines and some of the motivations behind them and concludes that many who have read his principles have been misled.]
In the Philosophical Commentaries, the “juvenile” Berkeley enthusiastically sketches out a bundle analysis of finite minds: a mind is constituted of episodes of volition and occurrences of ideas.1 But it is clear that Berkeley endorses a substance analysis by the time the Principles appears. As early as PR 2 he says that a mind is “a thing entirely distinct” from its ideas; and numerous additional passages in both the Principles and...
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