Berkeley on Objections to Idealism

Abstract This chapter presents three objections to Berkeley’s idealism that he anticipates and states very clearly, and assesses Berkeley’s own attempts to refute them. These objections are that his idealism (1) cannot accommodate the distinction between appearance and reality, (2) entails that ordinary objects exist intermittently, and (3) entails that such objects are not intersubjectively perceivable. The chapter argues that Berkeley’s replies to these objections are largely unsuccessful. His reply to (1) does not allow for the distinction (emphasized by Kant) between the time-order in which objects are perceived and the time-order in which they exist, and it also attributes to ideas of sense an order or regularity in time that can be safely attributed only to a mind-independent realm. His reply to (2) depends on an appeal to an all-perceiving God that rests partly on a circular “continuity” argument and partly on a “passivity” argument that has much the same weaknesses as Hume found in the teleological argument. And his reply to (3) wrongly conflates the qualitative identity of two or more ideas with numerical identity.