How Berkeley Can Go Quasi and Lose His Mind-Dependence

Host: Harvard Department of Philosophy, Colloquium Lecture

Speaker: Bart Streumer (University of Groningen)

Abstract: Berkeley defends idealism partly by taking ordinary objects such as tables and stones to consist of ideas. Materialists reject this account of ordinary objects. I argue that Berkeley can undermine this rejection by making quasi-realist moves of the kind that many expressivists about normativity make. This ultimately results in a version of idealism that we cannot believe, since trying to believe it will make us believe materialism. But I argue that this version of idealism may nevertheless be true.

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