* Available (i) for printing, (ii) for viewing on screen, (iii) for printing as a booklet. (For the last to work you must print 2-sided, flipping on the long side.)
* You can find extra copies on the door of my office (and also, on the course website, you can find several PDF versions in different layouts).
Although the body of Berkeley’s principles is labeled “part I,” no further part was ever published. (Apparently Berkeley had written at least some of it but lost the manuscript while traveling, and no one is sure what it might have contained.) There are no divisions in the body larger that the numbered sections, but the content is clearly divided into three segments. The first, §§1-33, might be regarded as stating the “principles” proper since Berkeley says in §34 that he will go on to answers objections to principles already stated. These replies to objections form a second segment, §§34-84. He goes on in §85 to consider further consequences of the views so far stated, and this forms a final third segment §§85-156.
Of course, the specific that Berkeley is discussing can change within one of these segments, and the next two assignments will reflect such divisions. On Wed., we will discuss the bulk of the first segnment. (On Fri. we will discuss the rest of that segment along with a part of the final segment. In both of these, Berkeley turns his attention more directly to spirits or souls.)
• Berkeley states his central claim early on (§3) in a slogan saying that the esse (‘to be’) of sensible things is percipi (‘to be perceived’). This slogan is often rendered in English as ‘To be is to be perceived’. Notice how, in his initial attacks (§§1-7) on the view that we perceive things that can exist independently of our perception, he employs the criticisms of abstract ideas that he offered in the introduction.
• In §§8-17, Berkeley attacks the claim that things resembling our ideas exist outside the mind. Notice especially his criticism of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
• In the remainder of this assigment, Berkeley develops two lines of argument more briefly. He asks, in §§18-20, how we could know anything existing outside minds; notice how we construes this as an argument against any possible argument for the existence of such things. And, after a section (§21) that alludes to topics in what I have called the second and third “segments” of the work, he argues in §§22-24 that we cannot even understand what it would mean for sensible objects to exist outside minds.
In general, you should think both about Berkeley’s success in supporting his “immaterialism” and about the strength of his specific arguments against opponents. The latter arguments have often influenced even those who did not accept his basic position. (Of course, that raises the problem of finding a way to accept those arguments without accepting immaterialism.)