Discussion

Berkeley makes an ingenuous argument for eliminating the notion of a material world that can exist outside of perception. If Berkeley is right, and To be is to be perceived, then it follows that we can all have our own individual realities depending on our own individual perceptions. Such a view would horrify the Greeks. Plato in particular believed that reality and truth, in order to serve as guides for us, must be seen as “objective,shared, and absolute.In order to avoid the problem of solipsism, Berkeley brings in the notion of God as an infinite and perfect mind, yielding an infinite and perfect perception of reality. But if each of us has our own perception of God, then it is questionable whether such a concept can serve as a basis for any claim to objective truth. If reality is tied to perception, do we have to give up the notion that there is any “objective” reality that we all share? Should we accept Berkeleys view that science is just another perception of the world, and not a source for objective truth about the world? Does he succeed in proving that not only is beauty in the eye of the perceiver, but everything else is as well, including all of the so called “objective facts that science discusses? Before commenting on Berkeley’s’ idealist philosophy, it will be useful for you recall any comments you made regarding Platos arguments. Do you reject his notion that there can be an objective truth regarding courage, beauty, justice, happiness, and so on? Do you prefer the notion that we all have our own reality and truth? As you reflect on Berkeley’s philosophy, try to be consistent with what you have said about Platos views. David Hume’s Skepticism David Hume was a skeptic. This means that he makes no claims about reality.  Instead, he makes claims regarding what we can know about reality. For Hume, knowledge must be empirically based based proof. As an empiricist, he says that unless our ideas about what is true, and what is rea,l are backed up by “sense experience,” then they have no real meaningfulness as ideas, and thus, are unknowable as true or false. We may hold onto an idea, because it makes us feel good, or because of habit, but not because there is any rationality supporting the idea. In other words, we can have a non-rational, or perhaps even an irrational belief about something; but we cannot have rational knowledge. Hume’s skepticism is considered very radical because he claims that most of our most fundamental “beliefs” cannot be proven in the empirical sense that he demands. Hume makes the same sort of argument over and over. If we cannot present a sense impression to support our idea, then the idea is a mere belief, rather than knowledge. Is Hume right? Do we have no knowledge of a world that continues to exist when we are not experiencing it? People typically “believe” that the world they wake up to is the same world that existed when they went to sleep. But Hume says that we cannot prove this. All we can say is that, “Well, it looks exactly the same as I remember it.” But if two things look the same, does not prove that they are the same? Moreover, if the world that we see now (our sense impression) is being compared to a mere “memory” of the world (an idea) from one hour ago. how reliable is that? Hume also says that we have no knowledge that there is any causal relationships (necessary connections) within the world that we do experience at each moment. We can see that things happen one after another. But we cannot see that there is anything necessary in a sequence of events. We merely get into a habit of expecting certain things to happen, just as a dog gets into a habit of expecting a reward when it does something for which it has been trained to expect a reward. Is my “belief” that someone is calling me, whenever my phone rings, nothing more than a habit– a conditioned response? Can I prove that someone must be on the line? Or have I just bee trained to expect it? What do you guys think? The Kantian Turn Inward Kant both agrees and disagrees with Hume. He agrees that we cannot have knowledge of what the world is ultimately like “out there,” completely independent from the human mind. But he disagrees over whether we can have some basic knowledge about the world, as human being must experience it. Kant says that we can have objective knowledge of how the human mind organizes and shapes the world. His philosophy tries to show that we all share an identical set of very basic concepts and categories, which we use to shape the basic features of the world in the same way. Its as if we were all wearing the same type of sunglasses. We would all see the world in the same way. And if we did not know that we were wearing these glasses, we would all likely believe that we were all seeing the world as it is “out there.” Kant says that we can know that there must be a world “out there.” But we cannot know what it is like, independently of how we must experience the world. Thus, the only world we can ever know is the human world, what he calls the “phenomenal” world, a world that is created by humans for humans. Is Kant right about this? Are human beings forever limited to (trapped within?) a world of their own making? Is any attempt to know ultimate reality a lot like any attempt to know what a banana looks like and tastes like independently from what it looks and tastes like to us? How could anyone ever prove that he or she had discovered the objective taste of a banana? What do you think?

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