Berkeley's Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us?

by John Campbell, Quassim Cassam

Overview

Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees, etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191025556
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	08/21/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	963 KB

About the Author

Quassim Cassam is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He was previously Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, Professor of Philosophy at University College London, and also taught for many years at Oxford University. He is the author of Self and World (1997) and The Possibility of Knowledge (2007), both published by Oxford University Press. John Campbell is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Before that he was Wilde Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Past, Space and Self (MIT, 1994) and Reference and Consciousness (OUP, 2002).

Table of Contents

Preface1. The Historical Background, John Campbell2. A Straightforward Solution to Berkeley's Puzzle, John Campbell3. Experiencing Objects as Mind-Independent, John Campbell4. The Role of Sensory Experience in Propositional Knowledge, John Campbell5. Berkeley's Puzzle, Quassim Cassam6. Experientialism, Quassim Cassam7. The Relational View of Experience, Quassim Cassam8. Representationalism, Quassim CassamCampbell's EpilogueCassam's EpilogueReferencesIndex

Editorial Reviews

"...this book will prove very useful for advanced graduate students and faculty who do research on Berkeley, the history of empiricism, the theory of perception, and epistemology... Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty." —Choice

"Its discussions are guided by genuine insight about which philosophical questions are valuable to engage and their responses to these questions involve an unusually high clarity of thought and attention to detail. The result surpasses what either author would have achieved independently and should serve as a useful model for other philosophers to emulate" —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online

From the Publisher