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‘The Absolute Existence of Unthinking Things’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. A. Brunton
J. A. Brunton
Affiliation:
University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff
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Extract

Berkeley wrote of ‘the absolute existence of unthinking things’ as being, ‘words which are without meaning and including a contradiction’. There are few philosophers today who do not regard Berkeley as having been mistaken in this view, in that it is regarded as clearly not meaningless to suppose that there might be many objects about which no one happens to be thinking. Nor is it the aim of this paper entirely to resurrect such a view, though it is my purpose to try to show the subtlety of the logical and ontological issues involved in the problem of independent things.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 45 , Issue 174 , October 1970, pp. 267 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1970

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References

1 A New Theory of Vision and other writings page 125. (Everyman's)Google Scholar

2 The Bounds of Sense (1966).Google Scholar

3 ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,’ (The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXI, 1962Google Scholar). My page reference (page 176) is to the re-print in the Papermac Wittgenstein ed. Pitcher.

4 By this I mean, that, apart from a reference to the table in his study, Berkeley rarely introduces hypotheticals about human observers into his analysis of the concept of independent object.

5 Throughout this Paper, for convenience, I refer to ‘Berkeley's’ problem, when, more accurately, I should have referred to the problem he would have had about independent objects, had he not thought the introduction of the Divinity to be an adequate solution.

6 Kant's Analytic (1966).Google Scholar

7 There are certainly conceptual difficulties here. Is a ‘pain’ for an animal the same as a pain for us? But the main point stands.

8 ‘Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements.’ (Mind 1950).Google Scholar

9 Perception and the Physical World (1961).Google Scholar

10 Perceiving. A Philosophical Study (1957).Google Scholar