Language and the structure of Berkeley's world

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglo-Irish bishop, considered among the great philosophers of early modern Europe. Pearce develops a new interpretation of Berkeley's philosophy which emphasizes the importance of Berkeley's revolutionary theory of language and shows that Berkeley has greater relevance to current philosophy than has been thought.

According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. 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. The author of this book argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his 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 structure that our physical object talk 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. In Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas