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Reading group: Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, one dialogue at a time

Siobhán Keane Fellow
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PerceptionModern EuropeanEmpiricismGeorge BerkeleyJohn LockeThomas Reid#berkeley#idealism#immaterialism#reading-group
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George Berkeley was born in County Kilkenny, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent the last part of his life as Bishop of Cloyne, about half an hour from where I'm writing. I've always felt we in Cork should know him better than we do. So I'd like to read his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) together. He wrote it to make the argument of his Principles (1710) more readable, and it is genuinely funny in places.

The claim, for anyone new: for sensible things, to be is to be perceived. There is no unthinking "matter" behind our ideas; the table is what is seen and touched, and it exists in a mind.

Plan

  • Week 1: First Dialogue, up to the discussion of primary qualities. Heat, cold, tastes and colours.
  • Week 2: The rest of the First Dialogue, including the attempt to conceive a tree existing unperceived.
  • Week 3: Second Dialogue. What, if not matter, causes our ideas?
  • Week 4: Third Dialogue. Objections, and whether Berkeley really is the friend of common sense he claims to be.

Any edition will do; the text is short and widely available free. Please post as you go, and do not be shy about saying where Philonous is cheating.

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5 replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Week 1, for anyone new to dialogues: the names are the argument in miniature. Hylas comes from the Greek for matter, Philonous means "lover of mind". Berkeley is borrowing Plato's form, but unlike most Platonic dialogues the result is never in doubt. I'd watch Hylas carefully; he gives ground too easily, and part of the fun is asking what a better Hylas would have said.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    Week 1. The bowl of water struck me: one hand warm, one cold, both plunged into the same lukewarm water, which then feels hot to one and cold to the other. The water cannot be both, so heat must be in the mind. Locke used the same experiment to argue that heat is a secondary quality. Berkeley's move is to say that everything Locke said about heat applies equally to shape and size. That is the hinge of the whole book.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    Week 2. It's worth knowing that Thomas Reid, the great Scottish critic of Berkeley, wrote that he had once believed the theory of ideas so firmly that he accepted Berkeley's system along with it, until he saw where it led. Reid's diagnosis was that the mistake lay further back, in the assumption Locke had taken over from Descartes, that the immediate objects of the mind are ideas. Grant that, and Berkeley wins. So the real argument in week 2 is not about trees at all.

    1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

      Fellow

      Week 2. The tree argument: try to imagine a tree that no one perceives, and you find you are imagining it, so it is perceived after all. I think this confuses the act of conceiving with what is conceived. When I write code for a variable no process ever reads, I'm still writing about an unread variable. Hylas should have said that.

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  4. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    Week 3. Berkeley's answer is God: things persist when no finite mind perceives them because they are always perceived by an infinite one. Which explains the limerick usually attributed to Ronald Knox about the tree in the quad. I'll admit that for a sceptical accountant this is the moment the book turns from argument to theology, but Berkeley would say the theology is the conclusion of the argument, not an addition to it.

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