Here's an article on Berkeley from SEP with the fol headings;



George Berkeley (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• 1. Life and philosophical works
  
• 2. Berkeley's critique of materialism in the Principles and Dialogues
  
  • 2.1 The attack on representationalist materialism
    
    • 2.1.1 The core argument
      
    • 2.1.2 The likeness principle
      
    • 2.1.3 Anti-abstractionism
      
    • 2.1.4 What does materialism explain?
      
    
    
  
  
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  • 2.2 Contra direct realist materialism
    
    • 2.2.1 The master argument?
      
    • 2.2.2 The First Dialogue and relativity arguments
      
    
    
  
  
• 3. Berkeley's positive program: idealism and common sense
  
  • 3.1 The basics of Berkeley's ontology
    
    • 3.1.1 The status of ordinary objects
      
    • 3.1.2 Spirits as active substances
      
    • 3.1.3 God's existence
      
    
    
  • 3.2 Replies to objections
    
    • 3.2.1 Real things vs. imaginary ones
      
    • 3.2.2 Hidden structures and internal mechanisms
      
    • 3.2.3 Scientific explanation
      
    • 3.2.4 Unperceived objects-Principles vs. Dialogues
      
    • 3.2.5 The possibility of error
      
    • 3.2.6 Spirits and causation
      
    
    
  
  
• 4. Other philosophically important works [Not yet available]
  
  • 4.1 Berkeley's works on vision
    
  • 4.2 De Motu and Berkeley's Newtonianism
    
  • 4.3 Alciphron
    
  • 4.4 Siris
    
  
  
• Bibliography
  

I agree with of what is written above but there are many point which i disagree.
One example of what i disagree is where the comment on the Master Argument ended with;
"Thus (as many commentators have observed), this argument fails."


[[QUOTE]An interesting comment to note is;

"As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples.
Thus, although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary objects

This world is mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world, esse est percipi."

The concept above is mind-boggling as in Samm's post in the other thread.

Untangling and unravelling the above concept is the key to understanding Berkeley in greater depth.

As a very general observation, I think the tension between various forms of idealism, and various forms of materialism or objectivism, will remain perennial in Western philosophy. It is a continual vacilitation between 'subjective' and 'objective', 'self' and 'world', 'idea' and 'object'.

It cannot be resolved from within the framework in which Western philosophy exists.

As regards my contention about the shortcomings of the modern analytical tradition, I believe that this has been vindicated to some extent by extrain's admission that he has also has had to seek truth in something outside of the discipline of philosophy.

This is however a personal matter and I have no wish to debate it further.

There may be scope for further discussion of those issues in some other areas of the forum.

I agree completely. Check out, if you haven't already, Thomas Nagel's A View From Nowhere. Classic!

Does a world really exists independent of Mind?

Kant successfuly demonstrated that there was. He also showed that we can know this very fact, namely, that there exists an external world independent of Mind. He also demonstrated that we can know what happens in this external world independent of our minds, since, though we can perceive things directly, it is also impossible that this external world just is our perceptions because, if it were, cognition itself would be impossible.

I have a much better idea of the way in which Kant was a realist now. Actually I had made this point some months ago, and was told I was wrong, but didn't know the sources.

I will - have just bought another Nagel book, he is someone I am really starting to like.

Here's another way of contemplating the question, though. If we say 'experience' instead of 'mind', then where exactly is the demarcation point between 'world' and 'experience'?

All I will ever have is my 'experience of the world'.

This doesn't deny the fact that there is a world apart from my experience of it, but my experience of it is really what matters, from the viewpoint of philosophy, anyway.

I mean, through science,

I can find out all kinds of previously unimaginable things about it. But from a human perspective reality is lived experience. And in fact that is one of the things Nagel has really helped identify.

I do agree that Kant showed a way that while our mind is fundamental to the reality of lived experience, at the same time, he avoided the collapse into meaningless skepticism where mind is all that we know. But I have a long way to go with reading him yet.

I am not sure how you interpret Kant as a realist.

As far as i know, Kant is a transcendental idealist and an empirical realist as a subset of his transcendental idealism.

To Kant, the external world is independent of Mind, but that is qualified by space in us, thus ultimately reality is mind interdependent.
Note this in Kant's own words

The transcendental idealist, on the other hand, may be an empirical realist or, as he is called, a dualist;
that is, he may admit the existence of matter without going outside his mere self-consciousness,
or assuming anything more than the certainty of his representations, that is, the cogito, ergo sum.
For he considers this matter and even its inner possibility to be appearance merely; and appearance,
if separated from our sensibility, is nothing.
Matter is with him, therefore, only a species of representations (intuition),
which are called external, not as standing in relation to objects in themselves external,
but because they relate perceptions to the space in which all things are external to one another,
while yet the space itself is in us.

[CPR - Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality]


Each of the Kant terms in the above are really heavy weights but 'space' as Kant stated above, which is one of the most fundamental variable of his Critique is, "in us".
I would suggest you do a thorough exploration of the Critique rather than to rely on 'faith'.

Don't get me wrong, I really like your approach and have learned A TON already. Keep going by all means. I am just a bit of a wuss, that is my problem.

Actually there is an idea I have posted in Metaphysics, called a non-metaphysical theory. I would really like some input on it. It is an idea I have been working on and I am sure there is something elementary wrong with it, but nobody has been able to tell me yet.

All we have is our experience

That's just trivially true, isn't it?




.

In the sense in which it is true, it is trivially true. But, in the sense in which it is false, it is substantively false.

The thing is (that as Hume taught us) we should not think it is true in the substantive sense just because it is true in the trivial sense.

Actually, that sounds altogether right! Nice job of driving it home!

So, it is not really true that all we have is our own experience. We have our knowledge that there are mind-independent objects. (Although Hume thought, for reasons of his own, that we could not know this).

Yes. I explained in the post before that one, Kant's brilliance. Did you read it by chance, where I contrasted how Berkeley (the empiricists) and Kant approached the whole problem at hand with respect to what we can know? It was just a general outline, but is very significant for understanding traditional skepticism versus a cautious realism.

Kant reversed the question to be asked. And I've heard or come across several Kant scholars who said this very thing.

In the Transcendental ANALYTIC Kant never says SPACE, TIME, or MATTER are MERELY WITHIN US. And he DOESN'T say SPACE, TIME, MATTER are APPEARANCES.

SIMPLY PUT--KANT NEVER SAYS ANYTHING IN THE PASSAGE YOU JUST QUOTED IN THE TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC or in the TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC.

By means of outer sense, a property of our mind, we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all without exception in space.
- CoPR -The Transcendental Aesthetic -Section I

The Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Space
I understand by a transcendental exposition the explanation of a concept, as a principle from which the possibility of other a priori synthetic knowledge can be understood.
For this purpose it is required (1) that such knowledge does really flow from the given concept, (2) that this knowledge is possible only on the assumption of a given mode of explaining the concept.
Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet a priori.
What, then, must be our representation of space, in order that such knowledge of it may be possible?
It [space] must in its origin be intuition; for from a mere concept no propositions can be obtained which go beyond the concept -- as happens in geometry (Introduction, V).
Further, this intuition must be a priori, that is, it [intuition] must be found in us prior to any perception of an object, and must therefore be pure, not empirical, intuition.
CoPR -The Transcendental Aesthetic -Section I

External objects or objects outside us are linked to a property of our mind, therefore external objects are mind interdependent.




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Non-sequitur. How is it "linked"?

Why don't you read up Kant's Critique first.
Its a long story.

But now you have indicated how it is linked, and how it is not linked too. Now, that question is whether if it is linked in the way that Kant argues, does it follow that external objects could not exist unless human beings exist. That does not seem to be true.