Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192507559
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World by : Kenneth L. Pearce

Download or read book Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World written by Kenneth L. Pearce and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to George Berkeley (1685-1753), there is fundamentally nothing in the world but minds and their ideas. Ideas are understood as pure phenomenal 'feels' which are momentarily had by a single perceiver, then vanish. Surprisingly, Berkeley tries to sell this idealistic philosophical system as a defense of common-sense and an aid to science. However, both common-sense and Newtonian science take the perceived world to be highly structured in a way that Berkeley's system does not appear to allow. Kenneth L. Pearce argues that Berkeley's solution to this problem lies in his innovative philosophy of language. The solution works at two levels. At the first level, it is by means of our conventions for the use of physical object talk that we impose structure on the world. At a deeper level, the orderliness of the world is explained by the fact that, according to Berkeley, the world itself is a discourse 'spoken' by God - the world is literally an object of linguistic interpretation. The structure that our physical object talk - in common-sense and in Newtonian physics - aims to capture is the grammatical structure of this divine discourse. This approach yields surprising consequences for some of the most discussed issues in Berkeley's metaphysics. Most notably, it is argued that, in Berkeley's view, physical objects are neither ideas nor collections of ideas. Rather, physical objects, like forces, are mere quasi-entities brought into being by our linguistic practices.

Berkeley's Three Dialogues

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191072303
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Berkeley's Three Dialogues by : Stefan Storrie

Download or read book Berkeley's Three Dialogues written by Stefan Storrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume of essays devoted to Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, a classic of early modern philosophy. Leading experts examine all the central issues in Berkeley's work. The Three Dialogues is a dramatization of Berkeley's philosophy in which the two protagonists Hylas and Philonous debate the full range of Berkeleyan themes: the rejection of material substance, the nature of perception and reality, the limits of human knowledge, and his approach to the perceived threats of skepticism, atheism and immorality. When Berkeley presented his first statement of his immaterialist philosophy in the Principles of Human Knowledge three years earlier he was met with incredulity - how could a sane person deny the existence of matter? Berkeley felt that a new approach was needed in order to bring people over to his novel point of view. This new effort was the Three Dialogues. In the preface to the Three Dialogues Berkeley stated that its aim was to "treat more clearly and fully of certain principles laid down” in the Principles. Esteem for Berkeley's work has increased significantly in recent decades, and this volume will be the starting-point for future research.

The Routledge Guidebook to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429678703
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (296 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Guidebook to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues by : Stefan Storrie

Download or read book The Routledge Guidebook to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues written by Stefan Storrie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Guidebook to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues is an engaging introduction to the last of a trio of works that cemented Berkeley’s position as one of the truly great philosophers of the western canon. Berkeley’s distinctive idealist philosophy has been a challenge and inspiration for thinkers ever since. Written for readers approaching this seminal work for the first time, this book: provides the philosophical context in which Three Dialogues was written; critically discusses the arguments in each of the Three Dialogues; and examines some of the principal disputes concerning the interpretation of his work. The Routledge Guidebook to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues offers a clear and comprehensive guide to this ground-breaking volume and includes further reading sections at the end of each chapter. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this influential work.

Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3111197581
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs by : Manuel Fasko

Download or read book Berkeley's Doctrine of Signs written by Manuel Fasko and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on Berkeley's doctrine of signs. The 'doctrine of signs' refers to the use that Berkeley makes of a phenomenon that is central to a great deal of everyday discourse: one whereby certain perceivable entities are made to stand in for (as 'signs' of) something else. Things signified might be other perceivable entities or they might also be unperceivable notions - such as the meanings of words. From his earliest published work, A New Theory of Vision in 1710, to those works written towards the end of life, including Alciphron in 1732, Berkeley is at pains to emphasise the crucial role that sign-usage, particularly (but not only) in language, plays in human life. Berkeley also connects sign-usage to our (human) relationship with God: an issue that was right of the heart of his philosophical project. The contributions in this volume explore the myriad ways that Berkeley built on such insights to better understand a range of philosophical issues - issues of epistemology, language, perception, mental representation, mathematics, science, and theology. The aim of this volume is to establish that the doctrine of signs can be seen as one of the unifying themes of Berkeley's philosophy. What's more, this theme is one which spans his whole philosophical corpus; not just his best-known works like the Principles and the Three Dialogues, but also his works on science, mathematics, and theology.

The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190873434
Total Pages : 704 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley by :

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley is a compendious examination of a vast array of topics in the philosophy of George Berkeley (1685-1753), Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, the famous idealist and most illustrious Irish philosopher. Berkeley is best known for his denial of the existence of material substance and his insistence that the only things that exist in the universe are minds (including God) and their ideas; however, Berkeley was a polymath who contributed to a variety of different disciplines, not well distinguished from philosophy in the eighteenth century, including the theory and psychology of vision, the nature and functioning of language, the debate over infinitesimals in mathematics, political philosophy, economics, chemistry (including his favoured panacea, tar-water), and theology. This volume includes contributions from thirty-four expert commentators on Berkeley's philosophy, some of whom provide a state-of-the-art account of his philosophical achievements, and some of whom place his philosophy in historical context by comparing and contrasting it with the views of his contemporaries (including Mandeville, Collier, and Edwards), as well as with philosophers who preceded him (such as Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Leibniz) and others who succeeded him (such as Hume, Reid, Kant, and Shepherd).

The Notions of George Berkeley

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350299693
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis The Notions of George Berkeley by : James Hill

Download or read book The Notions of George Berkeley written by James Hill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Berkeley's doctrine of notions is often disparaged or dismissed. In a systematic interpretation and positive reconstruction of the doctrine, James Hill presents Berkeley's understanding of the inner sphere and self-awareness, and reassesses the widely held view of Berkeley as an empiricist. Examining the development of Berkeley's philosophy from the early notebooks to the late Siris, Hill sets out how knowledge by notion involves a radical rejection of the perceptual model of self-cognition and of the attempt to frame our knowledge of the inner by analogy with the outer. He points to Berkeley's divergence from the assumption among rationalists and empiricists that we know our selves and our mental acts by idea, or by an immediate presentation before the mind. Weaving together Berkeley's conception of the intellect, conceptual thought, mathematics, ethics and theology in the light of the doctrine of notions, Hill invites us to treat Berkeley's philosophy of mind as distinct from the empiricist tradition. This cutting edge reflection on the doctrine of notions is essential reading for students and scholars specialising in Berkeley as well as early modern accounts of the self, perception and God.

George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192646540
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy by : Stephen H. Daniel

Download or read book George Berkeley and Early Modern Philosophy written by Stephen H. Daniel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Daniel presents a study of the philosophy of George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. Daniel does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, this book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in ways that transform the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights—for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects—are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

George Berkeley

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691217491
Total Pages : 648 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis George Berkeley by : Tom Jones

Download or read book George Berkeley written by Tom Jones and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2025-03-11 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive intellectual biography of the Enlightenment philosopher In George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. From his early brilliance as a student and fellow at Trinity College Dublin to his later years as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley brought his searching and powerful intellect to bear on the full range of eighteenth-century thought and experience. Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley’s life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without any physical substance underlying them. But he put forward this counterintuitive philosophy in support of the existence and ultimate sovereignty of God. Berkeley was an energetic social reformer, deeply interested in educational and economic improvement, including for the indigenous peoples of North America, yet he believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy and defended slavery. And although he spent much of his life in Ireland, he followed his time at Trinity with years of travel that took him to London, Italy, and New England, where he spent two years trying to establish a university for Bermuda, before returning to Ireland to take up an Anglican bishopric in a predominantly Catholic country. Jones draws on the full range of Berkeley’s writings, from philosophical treatises to personal letters and journals, to probe the deep connections between his life and work. The result is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of a major Enlightenment thinker and the world in which he lived.

Sign, Method and the Sacred

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110694921
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Sign, Method and the Sacred by : Jason Cronbach Van Boom

Download or read book Sign, Method and the Sacred written by Jason Cronbach Van Boom and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-08-23 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent can semiotics illuminate key problems in religious studies, given the centrality of symbols, language, and other modes of signification in religion and theology? The volume explores semiotic methodologies for the study of religion, with an emphasis on their critical and creative reconfigurations. The contributors come from different specialties, such as cognitive science, ethnography, linguistics, communication studies, art studies, religious studies, philosophy of religion, and theology. Part One consists of chapters focusing on theoretical perspectives. Part two focuses on applications in texts and case studies while still considering methodological issues. Many specific traditions and perspectives are taken up, such as C. S. Peirce, A. J. Greimas and the Paris School, Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture, Bruno Latour and material semiotics, linguistic anthropology, social semiotics, cognitive semiotics, embodied and enactive perspectives on language and mind, semiotics of the image and iconicity, multimodality, intertextuality, and semiotics of colors. The book provides readers with a succinct overview of how contemporary semiotics can be useful in understanding a broad array of topics in the study of religion.

The World Atlas of Language Structures

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191531243
Total Pages : 712 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis The World Atlas of Language Structures by : Martin Haspelmath

Download or read book The World Atlas of Language Structures written by Martin Haspelmath and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps - all in colour - display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals, tense, word order, and body part terminology. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description of the structural feature in question. The CD provides an interactive electronic version of the database which allows the reader to zoom in on or customize the maps, to display bibliographical sources, and to establish correlations between features. The book and the CD together provide an indispensable source of information for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages. The Atlas will be especially valuable for linguistic typologists, grammatical theorists, historical and comparative linguists, and for those studying a region such as Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, and Europe. It will also interest anthropologists and geographers. More than fifty authors from many different countries have collaborated to produce a work that sets new standards in comparative linguistics. No institution involved in language research can afford to be without it.

A Pattern Language

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190050357
Total Pages : 1216 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis A Pattern Language by : Christopher Alexander

Download or read book A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 1216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Empiricist Theories of Space

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030576205
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Empiricist Theories of Space by : Laura Berchielli

Download or read book Empiricist Theories of Space written by Laura Berchielli and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac. While space is a central and challenging issue for early modern empiricists, literature on this topic is sparse. This collection shows the diversity and problematic unity of empiricist views of space. Despite their common attention to the content of sensorial experience and to the analytical method, empiricist theories of space vary widely both in the way of approaching the issue and in the result of their investigation. However, by recasting the questions and examining the conceptual shifts, we see the emergence of a programmatic core, common to what the authors discuss. The introductory chapter describes this variety and its common core. The other contributions provide more specific perspectives on the issue of space within the philosophical literature. This book offers a unique overview of the early modern understanding of these issues, of interest to historians of early modern philosophy, historians and philosophers of science, historians of ideas, and all readers who want to expand their knowledge of the empiricist tradition.

Berkeley's World

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Publisher : Clarendon Press
ISBN 13 : 9780198752370
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (523 download)

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Book Synopsis Berkeley's World by : Tom Stoneham

Download or read book Berkeley's World written by Tom Stoneham and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Stoneham offers a clear and detailed study of Berkeley's metaphysics and epistemology, as presented in his classic work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, originally published in 1713 and still widely studied. Stoneham shows that Berkeley is an important and systematic philosopher whose work is still of relevance to philosophers today.

Berkeley's Puzzle

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0198716257
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

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Book Synopsis Berkeley's Puzzle by : John Campbell

Download or read book Berkeley's Puzzle written by John Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Pope and Berkeley

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230511023
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Pope and Berkeley by : T. Jones

Download or read book Pope and Berkeley written by T. Jones and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study dedicated to the relationship between Alexander Pope and George Berkeley, this book undertakes a comparative reading of their work on the visual environment, economics and providence, challenging current ideas of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in early eighteenth-century Britain. It shows how Berkeley's idea that the phenomenal world is the language of God, learnt through custom and experience, can help to explain some of Pope's conservative sceptical arguments, and also his virtuoso poetic techniques.

George Berkeley and Romanticism

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019266221X
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis George Berkeley and Romanticism by : Chris Townsend

Download or read book George Berkeley and Romanticism written by Chris Townsend and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written—even literary—style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.

Making the Social World

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199745862
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Making the Social World by : John Searle

Download or read book Making the Social World written by John Searle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.