Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous Summary

Role of Common Sense in “Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.” Berkeley, adhering to the venerable philosophical tradition inaugurated by Plato, decided to structure one of his works as a dialogue. This would be the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonus in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. The purpose of the present essay is to discuss and evaluate the role that common sense plays within this work by Berkeley. The first part of the essay will discuss the basic role of the concept of common sense within the dialogue; and the second part will argue that it is fully appropriate to grant this kind of role to common sense when engaging in metaphysics.
1. The Role of Common Sense To start with, then, it is clear that within Berkeley's
For example, if one agrees to meet one's friend in two hours, then that friend mysteriously appears at the right place at the right time, even though that friend was not actually "real" insofar as one did not perceive him at the time that the plans were being made. In order to address this issue, Berkeley introduces the concept of the mind of God. As Philonus says: "Don't I acknowledge a twofold state of things, the one copied or natural, the other copied-from and eternal? The former was created in time; the latter existed from everlasting in the mind of God" (58). This means that the basic consistency of the "external" world can be accounted for by the fact that there is always a perceiver present within any given situation—and that perceiver would be God. Independent from the perception of God, material reality would not exist; but independently from the perception of any given human being, material reality will perhaps continue to exist, insofar as the individual person himself only exists because he is an object in the perception of
The first is that the material world clearly does not exist (except in a state of hypothetical abstraction) insofar as one does not immediately perceive it; and the second is that the material world nevertheless exhibits the kind of consistency that one would expect from an independently existing object. To put it bluntly, this state of affairs is mysterious: it is difficult to understand this disjunction between what is immediately perceived and what would seem to be the rational truth. Berkeley resolves this contradiction not by concluding that immediate perception (or common sense) is mistaken but rather by making an analogy: in the same way that the individual material world exists as the result of any given person, the material world as such exists because of the perception of God. This implies that the world is in fact objectively real, in the sense that its existence does not depend on the perception of any one human being; but it is also not objectively real, insofar as it cannot exists without the gaze of the one true