Abstract

Philosophers have used two basic approaches to Berkeley's inconsistencies: explain the inconsistencies by arguing that Berkeley held more than one position at the same time, or accept the inconsistencies and explain that his philosophy developed as he aged. However, I believe that a third strategy is possible: explain Berkeley's inconsistencies in terms of his attempts to reach his stated goals. The result of that third methodology was the discovery that Berkeley's stated goals are incompatible insofar as he cannot achieve them without certain equivocations, certain ambiguities, and especially without leaving indeterminate the relationship between the ideas of sense in the finite minds and the ideas in God's mind, i.e., without refraining from committing to one or the other of the interpretations of archetypes. ;Berkeley's attempt to combat skepticism through idealism created difficulties for his realism; his claims that all our ideas of sense are the direct providence of God conflicted with his theory of perception, his empiricism; his nominalistic argument against abstract ideas , while useful in establishing his immaterialism, was in opposition to his realism and the common sense view that we know a common realm in which different individuals perceive the same objects. Placing the archetypes in God's mind may have allowed him to escape the difficulty of every idea being particular to the perceiver, but only the identity of the archetype and the ideas of sense in the finite mind could save him from skeptical doubts. Insisting on the necessity of sense experience provided for his empiricism but left him with the task of explaining sense perception without attributing causal efficacy to ideas of sense , and ultimately his Language Solution failed to remove all traces of causal efficacy from the ideas of sense as his ontology would require.