This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1860 edition. Excerpt: ... not be disagreeable to you, that in order to this, I make my appeal to Reason, from your remarks upon what I have written concerning Vision; since men who differ in the means, may yet agree in the end, and in the same candour and love of truth. ix. a sensible object I understand that which is properly perceived by sense. It is necessary to discriminate between the various employment of the terms Object and Subject. The word subject is used, in ordinary conversation, to denote the matter in hand or the thing under discussion; as when we speak of the subject of a discourse, or the subject of a surgical operation. In Logic it is that, with regard to which anything is affirmed or denied. The word object is employed to designate that towards which our efforts or desires are directed; as when we talk of the pursuit of wealth or pleasure as objects of men's lives. It is also used to point out and express whatever may be presented to the senses or thoughts of men. It will be seen, that the word subject is employed Things properly perceived by sense are immediately perceived. Besides things pro in a sense somewhat analogous to that for which object likewise stands, but the word trespasses beyond its province when it stands for the materia circa quam. In Philosophical phraseology, the term object denotes, 1, something absolutely existing independent of mind; 2, something relative and considered in connexion with mind. With the older philosophers the latter meaning prevailed; the ens objectivum denoting that which is present to mind, as an accidental object of thought, in contradistinction to the same thing in its real and essential nature. Des Cartes meant by objective reality the conformity of the representing idea with the actual reality which...

This edition provides texts from the full range of Berkeley's contributions to philosophy, and sets them in their historical and philosophical contexts.

According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.