UC Irvine

This dissertation defends a new interpretation of George Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley criticizes his opponents for their commitment to the “twofold existence of the objects of sense, the one… in the mind, the other… without the mind” (PHK 86). He believes this doctrine requires implausible departures from common sense and invites skeptical doubts. According to a familiar story, Berkeley avoids these problems by embracing a brand of idealism that collapses his opponents’ “twofold existence” into a single level of existence where the ideas in our minds are identical with physical reality. By investigating an underexplored set of connections between Berkeley’s theory of vision and his idealism, this dissertation shows the familiar story to be mistaken: rather than effecting any such collapse, Berkeley’s idealism (in virtue of the way it is shaped by his theory of vision) commits him to a novel and philosophically interesting doctrine of the twofold existence of the objects of sense that is not plagued by any of the same problems as his opponents’ version, and yet still implies a meaningful distinction between physical objects as they are in themselves and physical objects as we experience them.