Idealism
...I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it - “I refute it thus.”
James Boswell (1791)
Boswell is probably a little self effacing when he writes ‘ingenious sophistry’, he would have seen that there was more to Berkeley’s proposals than a stone could refute: the hardness of the stone is no different from the grey of its colour, both are sensations the origins and processing of which are to us nearly as complex and opaque as they were to Plato. The
objects
Go to a page which considers objects a little more.
of our world are at least partially
created
On different contributions to this creation.
in our minds, Berkeley’s merit was to pursue the point thoroughly and ask what else could there possibly be except these perceptions. Three hundred years later we can see that contemporary neuropsychological
proposals
A page introducing Gray's Comparator Hypothesis.
do map a route for our understanding of consciousness, nearer to Berkeley, than Johnson would have liked.
In he Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Boswell wrote: ‘After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal [made up of ideas]. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it...’ [continued above]
A boulder on an Icelandic beach benefiting from the extraordinary lucid light of high summer in high regions.
Above hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 29th June 2019
...guide to this site