(It's probably also worth pointing out that it's wrong to define idealism as the rejection of matter: Berkeley, for example, is adamant that matter exists. He just thinks it has to be assayed in terms of the mental. 

It's worth putting in a word for other species of idealist (which you don't really talk about), e.g. Kant, Hegel, Bradley, too.)

Miguel wrote:

I know, which is why I said "rejection of matter more generally". But then my point is just that such a discussion seems to miss the point. There is the mental, there is the material.

But Berkeley doesn't reject matter.* Nor does he merely call bundles of sense impressions "trees", "rocks", etc. Rather, he assays trees, rocks, and so on as sense impressions in the same way that you assay them as matter, substantial form, and accident. Both these views are pieces of analytic ontology, and go beyond common sense. My question was: by the time Berkeley is done constructing his metaphysic, is his view really that strange compared to yours? It's not like he's making trees dependent on finite minds. 

(Nor do most other idealists reject matter (i.e. none I can think of right now), which you imply when you write "idealism, or more generally a denial of matter" and treat idealism as one position among many that deny matter.)

*Unless you mean matter in the Aristotelian sense. But then contemporary trope theorists like Williams, Campbell, etc., are idealists, rather than the adamant realists they are.

John West wrote:

Miguel wrote:

I know, which is why I said "rejection of matter more generally". But then my point is just that such a discussion seems to miss the point. There is the mental, there is the material.

But Berkeley doesn't reject matter.* Nor does he merely call bundles of sense impressions "trees", "rocks", etc. Rather, he assays trees, rocks, and so on as sense impressions in the same way that you assay them as matter, substantial form, and accident. Both these views are pieces of analytic ontology, and go beyond common sense. My question was: by the time Berkeley is done constructing his metaphysic, is his view really that strange compared to yours? It's not like he's making trees dependent on finite minds. 

(Nor do most other idealists reject matter (i.e. none I can think of right now), which you imply when you write "idealism, or more generally a denial of matter" and treat idealism as one position among many that deny matter.)

*Unless you mean matter in the Aristotelian sense. But then contemporary trope theorists like Williams, Campbell, etc., are idealists, rather than the adamant realists they are.

 
If he blurs the line between the material and what we call mental, then yes, it is much stranger. I am not denying it's a piece of analytic ontology, nor am I criticizing it for simply going beyond common sense (I didn't even explicitly mention Berkeley). My point is just that we have to do justice to our common understanding and experience of matter, which invariably includes its distinction from the mental; thus we can say that matter is matter; mental objects and abstractions (for example) are different things. Matter is one thing and it cannot e.g. be universal, only particular. A concept is a different thing and it can be universal. A form is also something that is distinct from matter, and is "universalizable". If the idealist can make sense of these things then an idealist can be a hylemorphist (and I mentioned thst before in another thread). If he can't do justice to such facts, then he starts moving away from the basic experience we have of reality, with or without God to keep thinking stones into existence.

So if he blurs the lines between the material and the mental, his ontology comes out as something much stranger than Aristotle's, I'd say. And if he doesn't, then I think hylemorphism and the rest of the party is hard to resist. I feel like the basic experience - which leads one into concluding an abyss between matter and mind - remains whether or not we believe world can exist in the absence of observers, and this basic experience and understanding is what matters, in the end. It also gives the advantage of allowing one to unceremoniously dismiss contrary views as "meaningless" - something always desirable for analytic philosophers.

Last edited by Miguel (6/29/2018 12:50 am)

My point is just that we have to do justice to our common understanding and experience of matter, which invariably includes its distinction from the mental

Suppose I walk to the apple tree in my backyard. If I keep it steadily in my gaze, I see the colours of its leaves and trunk. If I run my hand across it, I feel the roughness of its bark. If I kick it, I hurt my foot. Now suppose, unbeknownst to me, the tree was cut down last week and I'm vividly hallucinating everything. It appears that the (“completely mental”) hallucination of the tree has done justice to my experience of the tree.

The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for hallucinations about the rest of our ordinary experience. So it appears that the mental can in fact do justice to our ordinary experience of matter. (I'm assuming we're talking about matters. We have no ordinary experience of mattera.)

It also gives the advantage of allowing one to unceremoniously dismiss contrary views as "meaningless" - something always desirable for analytic philosophers.

It's never a good idea to “unceremoniously dismiss” great philosophers.

Miguel wrote:

No, it cannot. Because your hallucination of an apple tree is very, very different from your mental objects. The reason you conclude (wrongly) that you're seeing an apple tree is because you can see its colors, leaves; feel the roughness of its bark; kick it and hurt your foot, etc. That's kinda what I was trying to say, with or without merit: even if the external world were a big hallucination, still it is a very different kind if thing from what the "mental" is. I cannot kick my ideas, feel its texture, or anything like that. All these sense impressions, for example, form a coherent object that seems very distinct in nature to what (e.g.) abstractions and thoughts. This difference persists even if the external world didn't exist.

I think what might be happening, Miguel, is that you're conflating the cogitationes with the cogitata. The former includes the subjective processes of perceiving, remembering, imagining, judging, and so on, whereas the latter includes that which is perceived, remembered, imagined, judged, and so on. Berkeley doesn't need to claim that we're perceiving cogitationes, only cogitata, and the challenge for you is to show that the cogitata need involve the non-mental*. The purpose of the hallucination example was to show that they don't (as Descartes, whose terminology I'm using, probably would have agreed).

It's not enough to just pound the table and insist that all cogitata need involve the non-mental. I've just shown you that they mustn't.

(Berkeley can distinguish the veridically perceived from the falsidically perceived, the hallucinated, by saying that veridically perceived are part of God's picture of the world, whereas the falsidically perceived aren't. (My falsidical perceiving, my hallucinating something, and my hallucination appearing to be there for me is part of God's picture of the world, but that is something else.))

*Or, if you prefer, the non-mental other than God and other minds.