This is the very sleight of hand I was referring to. Metaphysical realists (or materialists in this instance) hijacked the term "external world" and tried to cozen us into believing it has always referred to their general substance and/or transcendent version of bodies and space. By gosh, there was no "external world" until materialists came along with their product of reflective thought! Let's replace the empirical environment plainly seen and felt as outside our equally plainly seen and felt bodies with an abstract realm and substance that is hidden, so that we can then run about like idiotic chickens with our heads cut-off and proclaim we have no proof of an external world. "Proof" rather than empirical evidence now entering the picture because the kind of external world they've foisted upon us was a product of reasoning, ergo it seems to now require the concoction of an invincible argument to verify it.Belinda wrote:HM wrote:For Berkeley esse is percipi ; to be is to be perceived. The implication is that being depends on perception. Who perceives? Whose ideas prevail? The human and God perceive, but God perceives infinitely and the human finitely.Therefore Berkeley is sceptical about the reality of the external world.Berkeley wasn't sceptical of the external world; properly understood, the latter just is the content of extrospection, co-confirmed with others.
One of the poor victims of this legerdemain is moaning down the block: "Oh, woe is me, scepticism is upon us! Scepticism! The external world I interact with everyday is suddenly but a mere representation or ectype of an archetypal world that only inferrings or speculations can feign to explore. I have no direct contact with it so now I harbor doubts about this new external world that has replaced the old, and apparently am forgetful that there even was the old one to return to!" LOL
BERKELEY: "...we have shown the doctrine of Matter or corporeal substance to have been the main pillar and support of Scepticism..."
And before anyone can get to it: Yes, Berkeley very plainly says in the The Three Dialogues that there is no need for the "external world", but this is after materialism has hijacked the expression. He's an empiricist and an ancestor of phenomenalism referring to metaphysical mumbo-jumbo [other than his own immaterialism], and not referring to what is the external world to those of a perceptual evidence bent.
Kant's empirical realism, which accompanies his transcendental idealism, revolves around a somewhat similar stance of what "real" and "outer" are. Matter and objects in space here are not something that are abstract, invisible, and inferred. They are manifested:
"...The transcendental idealist is, therefore, an empirical realist, and allows to matter, as appearance, a reality which does not permit of being inferred, but is immediately perceived. [...] In order to arrive at the reality of outer objects I have just as little need to resort to inference as I have in regard to the reality of the object of my inner sense, that is, in regard to the reality of my thoughts. [...] All outer perception, therefore, yields immediate proof of something real in space, or rather is the real itself. In this sense empirical realism is beyond question; that is, there corresponds to our outer intuitions something real in space."
If one literally excluded space and time and all the categories that Kant does from the so-called "noumenal world", then his transcendent circumstance is no "world" all. The natural organization that things in themselves conforms to in experience - or as their phenomenal counterparts - is provided by the system of Sensibility and Understanding, which is common or universal to all humans. Kant's empirical world is not a copy of an archetypal world, it exists for the first time in the synthesis of sense and intellection (there is direct contact with that world), preceded by a receptivity in regard to the former faculty. "Other humans" as well as many other "things" would still be existing powers that interpenetrated and affected each other in their spaceless non-realm, but there is no literal world on the "freedom side" of themselves that they are enslaved to. (And "affected" does not refer to a causality grounded in spatial and temporal relations).