I was looking on half.com recently to see if I could find an affordable volume containing Berkeley's Siris last week when I came upon this 1965 collection, Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (ISBN 0020641702 according to half.com; it's apparently too old to have an ISBN printed in it) edited and with introduction by none other than D. M. Armstrong. I was unable to find any further information on the book, but, at half.com prices, decided it was worth buying just to get Armstrong's introduction (and on the off-chance that it contained Siris). Since there was no information on this book available online, and there are more copies still available, I thought I should provide some information myself.
First, it contains the following works:
It is of note that this is almost the same collection of works as the 1975 Everyman edition edited by A. J. Ayers under the title Philosophical Works Including the Works on Vision, which was in print at least as recently as 1998 (that's the year my copy was printed). The Ayers edition has a more complete chonology of "Berkeley's Life and Times," as they put it (though the Armstrong edition does have a brief timeline) and contains "The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained" in addition to the works already listed.
Armstrong's introduction shows great respect for Berkeley as a thinker, but is ultimately hostile. It occasionally seemed dismissive to me, but this was only because of the necessary brevity of an introduction (it is 27 pages in length). Armstrong takes Berkeley seriously and generally states his position strongly, but since he is trying to introduce all of the works in the volume in a mere 27 pages is unable to treat the arguments in great depth.
The introduction opens with the paragraph:
One good way to study philosophy is to study the systems of the great philosophers. In an English-speaking country, there is much to be said for beginning with Berkeley. His most important works are superlatively well written. They are simple and clear. They are quite brief. What they say may be wrong, but it is never dull. There is interesting argument for even the most incredible assertion.
This is a fitting opening for the introduction, as it gives us a good idea of Armstrong's attitude toward Berkeley: his views are "wrong" and his claims are "incredible," but he is always "interesting" and never "dull." In short, Armstrong seems to view Berkeley as worth reading because he is obviously wrong but nevertheless difficult to refute. (I, of course, take rather a different view of Berkeley, and might be inclined rather to take this view of Armstrong!)
Armstrong divides his introduction into four principle sections, dealing with esse is percipi ("to be is to be perceived"), the critique of abstraction, the theory of vision, and the philosophy of science. The first section is by far the longest. In each section we have a development of Berkeley's position and his reasoning for it, followed by a sketch of the general direction of a refutation (sometimes a Berkeleian counter-refutation is given, but the anti-Berkeleian nearly always has the last word, and in the few cases where Berkeley has the last word the Berkeleian result is presented as a paradox, rather than a way the world might be). I am tempted to remark on the inadequacy of the refutations, but this would be unfair as, due to length, they are no more than sketches of general directions and all of them have the potential to be developed into important objections.
There is, however, at least one place where Armstrong's objection totally misses the mark, and this is in the claim (p. 16) that "Berkeley never shows any awareness" of the fact that the argument against matter could be turned against Berkeley's argument for the existence of other minds. However, when Berkeley discusses our knowledge of other minds at Principles 145 and 148 he says that we are informed of other minds by certain "effects or concommitant signs" that serve to "mark them out." Berkeley's view is that God, speaking to us through our senses, informs us of the existence of other minds. In their paper "Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley on Whether We Can Dream Marks on the Waking State" (Studia Leibnitia 24 (1992): 177-181) Russell Wahl and Johnathan Westphal point out that in the case of all three of the philosophers they mention dream/hallucination skepticism serves as part of a reductio against an opposing view, but from within the confines of the philosopher's own view we are supposed to be safe from skepticism. In this way, contradiction is avoided. (I deal with this issue from two different directions in my "The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics" The Dualist 13 (2006), which has apparently been published on paper, but is not yet online, and "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley," forthcoming in Religious Studies - the former paper argues that the consistency and meaningfulness of our perceptions can be used by Berkeley to draw a distinction between the dreaming/hallucinating and waking states, and the latter paper discusses the use of the language of sense perception to refer to other minds and so rescue us from solipsism.)
I imagine that others who have studied Berkeley will, like me, be puzzled at the ordering of the sections. Indeed, it might make sense to discuss these topics in precisely the reverse order, since the critique of abstraction and the theory of vision form the foundation for the ultimate critique of matter and the establishment of the doctrine that esse is percipi, and this is part of the above problem. Armstrong divorces these issues from each other almost entirely when they are in fact intimately related, and he discusses them in the wrong order. Had he developed the critique of abstraction and the account of a divine language of vision before he had developed the critique of matter, he might have made Berkeley's claims more compelling and not run into this faulty critique of Berkeley on other minds. Similarly, Armstrong does a disservice to serious students by placing the New Theory of Vision at the end of the volume, when it should be at the beginning where Ayer put it, seeing as it was published first and forms an important introductory work before the Principles of Human Knowledge.
Another deficiency of Armstrong's introduction is that, apart from a passing reference to The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (p. 30), it shows no awareness of any of Berkeley's works not included in this particular edition. This may be intentional, as the edition seems to be intended primarily for students who have no prior exposure to Berkeley, but it is nevertheless a weakness of the presentation. Armstrong sometimes by omitting references to other works of Berkeley, especially the Alciphron, Armstrong sometimes fails to do justice to Berkeley's overall position.
Finally, Armstrong seems to downplay the importance of God in Berkeley's metaphysics, and shows little or no interest in Berkeley's theology. This is something that one simply cannot do while studying Berkeley seriously.
I nevertheless suspect that I will find this introduction very useful on the whole. The reason is that it provides concise, simple, and well-formulated summaries of the most important objections to Berkeley's central doctrines. Pages 8 and 9 even provide what is effectively a presentation of the central point of Moore's "Refutation of Idealism." This brief introduction is, I think, a very good account of the objections a Berkeleian will need to answer, very much as Armstrong's Universals provides very good outlines of the most important objections to each of a variety of theories of properties. Armstrong's introduction could also be useful in this respect to someone who had never read Berkeley before and I think that it is more focused and consequently easier to get through than Ayer's introduction (though I haven't read through Ayer recently). In short, I recommend this introduction (and I even more strongly recommend the works of Berkeley included in this edition), but I advise readers to approach Armstrong at least as critically as Armstrong approaches Berkeley.
D. M. Armstrong is the best known proponent of a currently quite popular understanding of natural laws. Laws so understood are, as a result, called Armstrong-Laws, or A-Laws for short. These are distinguished from L-Laws, named for David Lewis. L-laws are identical to regularities in events (but not all regularities are laws). Unlike L-Laws, A-Laws are actual metaphysical entities, which exist independently of their instances. That is, according to this theory, the Law of Universal Gravitation is a thing out there in the universe (not in the mind) which actually makes massive objects move toward one another. The attraction (no pun intended) of A-Laws is that they seem to explain why there should be regularity in the world at all, whereas L-Laws simply state the regularities. Armstrong-type theories posit that there is actually something out there which makes the regularities occur. Now, despite Armstrong's naturalist/physicalist claims, this thing must be transcendent and non-physical (not any more so than Armstrong's "states of affairs," but that's another story).
Philosophers usually talk for simplicity about laws of the form "all Fs are Gs" or "all Fs are followed by Gs," but, of course, the real laws that physicists talk about are not like this at all. The real laws are things like F=ma or K=(1/2)mv^2. (Note that I say the real laws are like this - we don't actually live in a Newtonian universe, so these are not examples of actual natural laws, or at least not fundamental ones - macrophysics is usually considered by philosophers to be one of the "special sciences" like geology or psychology, and these are supposed to follow from the true theory of microphysics, whatever that might be.) It is not clear to me (perhaps because I haven't read the positive part of Armstrong's book What is a Law of Nature? - I've only read the critique of "naive regularity theory" so far) how Armstrong's specific claim (not held by all Armstrong-type theories) that laws are relations between universals is supposed to deal with these sorts of laws, which aren't actually about Fs being Gs. As a result, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should posit multiple laws of nature: why not just conjoin them?
If we do this, we've got a transcendent, non-physical entity responsible for the orderliness and regularity of the world, "and this all men call God." Hmm...
Of course, if you are concerned about confusing this entity which, for all we know, is impersonal with personal conceptions of God or with some religious theory, you might not want to give it that name, but at the very least you've got the Heraclitean logos (not to be confused with the Johannine logos), a fundamental ordering principle of the universe, and this certainly seems to be a god-like thing. Of course, if we were actually positing God in a more traditional sense, he is supposed to be a necessary being and to create freely, so this would explain why the laws are as they are, but, whatever the case, we seem to have here at the very least something that might be reasonably described as an impersonal, disinterested (small-g) god, and maybe we've got a good deal more than that.
(For the record, I believe in a sort of regularity theory instead, despite believing that God wills at every moment that the laws hold; this is because I believe that laws are strictly identical with true law statements, where these statements are purely descriptive in nature, or something like that.)
(I had to write this post, just so I could use that title.)
In D.M. Armstrong's book Universals: an Opinionated Introduction, he discusses the pros and cons of a number of theories of the metaphysics of properties. Chapter three deals with "resemblance nominalism." According to resemblance nominalism, properties can be accounted for in terms of degrees of resemblance between the various objects having the property. So, for instance, on object is red if and only if it resembles some paradigmatic red objects. This theory is plagued by the "Resemblance Regress." Armstrong quotes Bertrand Russells' version as the "classical exposition" of the difficulty (p. 53):
If we wish to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. But then the resemblance required will have to be a universal. Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance between each pair, for then we will have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal. The relation of resemblance therefore, must be a true universal and having been forced to admit this universal, we find that it is no longer worthwhile to invent difficult and implausible theories to avoid the admission of such universals as whiteness and triangularity.
“... forms are like patterns set in nature, and other things resemble them and are likenesses; and this partaking of the forms is, for the other things, simply being modeled on them.”
“If something resembles the form,” he said, “can that form not be like what has been modeled on it, to the extent that the thing has been made like it? Or is there any way for something to be like what is not like it?”
“There is not.”
“And is there a compelling necessity for that which is like to partake of the same one form as what is like it?”
“There is.”
“But if like things are like by partaking of something, won't that be the form itself?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Therefore, nothing can be like the form, nor can the form be like anything else. Otherwise, alongside the form another form will always make its appearance and if that form is like anything, yet another; and if the form proves to be like what partakes of it, a fresh form will never cease emerging.” (Parmenides 132d-133a, tr. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan)
One major trouble that Russell ... overlooked is that all solutions to the Problem of Universals, including realism about universals, require a fundamental relation. But if so, the regress Russell finds in the case of resemblance reappears with the other theories ... Given the natures a and b, they must resemble to the exact degree they do resemble ... the resemblance is not an additional fact about the world over and above the possession by a and b of the particularized natures that they have. The relation supervenes on the natures, and if it supervenes, I suggest, it is not distinct from what it supervenes upon ... I think that this means that we do not have to take it too seriously metaphysically. It is an ontological free lunch.(pp. 54-56)