What is the difference between idealism and skepticism

Idealism and Yogacara Buddhism. Saam Trivedi - - Asian Philosophy 15 3 — Thomas E. Webb - - Freeport, N. Kant's Idealism: The Current Debate. Anthony Brueckner - - Philosophical Topics 19 1 Kenneth R. Westphal - - In E. Onnasch ed. Ihre Entwicklung bis zum Opus postumum und Nachwirkung. Added to PP index Total views 60, of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 9 72, of 2,, How can I increase my downloads? Sign in to use this feature.

About us. Editorial team. Applied ethics. History of Western Philosophy. Normative ethics. Philosophy of biology. An intellectual substance, i. Whoever admits only spirits in this world is an idealist. Baumgarten follows Wolff in distinguishing between two possible forms of idealism, first egoism, which admits the existence of only one spirit, that of the person contemplating such a doctrine, and then idealism proper, which allows the existence of multiple spirits.

But both are refuted by the same argument. This argument builds on a Leibnizian principle not hitherto mentioned, the principle of plenitude, or the principle that the perfection of the most perfect world, which is the one that God created, consists in the maximal variety of the universe compatible with its unity or coherence e. Baumgarten then argues simply that a universe that contains not only more substances but also more kinds of substances rather than fewer is a more perfect universe, and necessarily exists in preference to the other; and a universe that contains not only multiple minds rather than a single mind but also bodies in addition to minds is therefore a more perfect universe than either of the former would be, and is therefore the kind of world that actually exists.

In his words,. No one outside of the immediate sphere of Leibnizianism would ever again proffer such a refutation of idealism. The relation between ontological and epistemological arguments for idealism is complex. Idealism can be argued for on ontological grounds, and then bring an epistemological argument in its train.

Or an epistemological argument can be offered independently of ontological assumptions but lead to idealism, especially in the hope of avoiding skepticism.

The first option may have been characteristic of some rationalists, such as Leibniz in his more strictly idealist mood. Both forms of argument are found within early modern British philosophy. We find epistemological considerations pushing toward idealism in both Hobbes and Locke in spite of the avowed materialism of the first and dualism of the second, who therefore obviously did not call themselves idealists.

Berkeley argues for idealism on epistemological grounds and then adds ontological considerations in order to avert skepticism, although he calls his position immaterialism rather than idealism. All of these movements fed into the general movement of rationalism, while the British philosophers, typically lumped together under the rubric of empiricism in spite of their own differences, all believed, albeit for different reasons, that the doctrines put forward by dogmatic metaphysicians rest on a totally unfounded conception of knowledge and cannot survive rational scrutiny empiricists might themselves be considered critical rationalists.

Thus the primary task of philosophy for these philosophers became that of providing a theory of knowledge based on an adequate assessment of the constitution of human nature, for they were interested in knowledge only as a human achievement.

However, it is not human nature in general that is of interest in this context but the workings of those human powers or faculties that are responsible for our human ability to relate to the world in terms of knowledge-claims. This is easily confirmed by looking briefly at some of their main convictions concerning knowledge, starting with Thomas Hobbes — He describes the details of this process most succinctly in a short passage in chapter 6 of the first part Human Nature of his The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic , his first major philosophical work.

The first principle of knowledge therefore is that we have such and such conceptions; the second, that we have thus and thus named the things whereof they are conceptions; the third is, that we have joined those names in such manner, as to make true propositions; the fourth and last is, that we have joined those propositions in such manner as they be concluding.

The message is straightforward with respect to both the basis and the formation of knowledge: senses sensations are basic to our acquisition of knowledge in that they lead to conceptions representations to which we attach names concepts which we then put together into propositions which, if true, already constitute knowledge, and from which there arise further knowledge if we draw conclusions in an orderly way from them. Although the account given by Hobbes of the origin and the formation of knowledge is rightly called empiricist because it traces all knowledge back to the senses or sensations and their non-sensory causes, i.

Nevertheless, his account may lead to an early form of epistemologically motivated idealism. Now things may be considered, that is, be brought into account, either as internal accidents of our mind, in which manner we consider them when the question is about some faculty of the mind; or as species of external things, not as really existing, but appearing only to exist, or to have a being without us [emphasis added]. And in this manner we are now to consider them.

Elements of Law II. In spite of a pre-reflective disposition toward dualism, an explicit argument for an agnostic attitude with respect to the ultimate constitution of reality is also characteristic of John Locke — I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind; or trouble myself to examine, wherein its essence consists, or by what motions of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come to have any sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings; and whether those ideas do in their formation, any, or all of them, depend on matter or no [emphasis added]: These are speculations, which, however curious and entertaining, I shall decline.

Book I, chap. I, 2; see also II. Such an investigation presupposes an acquaintance with our own minds, and thus according to Locke the most pressing task is to understand the mind or the understanding itself. Although his description of these processes differs in some interesting ways from the model Hobbes proposes, in the end both Hobbes and Locke share the view 1 that whatever we can know depends on our having ideas which must be somehow based in sensation, 2 that there must be some external cause Hobbes or some source of affection Locke which gives rise to sensory ideas, yet 3 ultimately we are ignorant about the real constitution of these causes and these sources.

What we know is the content and structure of our own ideas, although we have no reason to deny the existence of external objects and even assume that in some regards external objects resemble our ideas of them in the case of primary qualities. This is indicated especially well by his theory of substance and his remarks concerning the limits of knowledge. Substances, Locke famously holds,. Essay II. Although Locke thinks of these reasons as totally compelling, he sees quite well that they do not justify any claim as to what a substance or a thing really is, what its nature or constitution consists in.

Thus he never gets tired of emphasizing that we only have a confused idea of substance a claim also made by Leibniz about three-quarters of our knowledge, although he held that we have a clear concept of what substance is , and repeats quite often at least three times in Essay book II, chap.

XXIII alone that. Whatever therefore be the secret, abstract nature of substance in general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances, are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself. He restricts this agnostic attitude not just to corporeal substances or bodies but extends it to spiritual substances or minds as well:. It is plain then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance or spirit; and therefore from our not having any notion of the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its non-existence, than we can for the same reason deny the existence of body; it being as rational to affirm there is no body, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of matter, as to say there is no spirit, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of a spirit.

This criticism of any metaphysical claims concerning the ultimate constitution of reality is accompanied by a more general warning against the overstepping of the natural limits of our cognitive faculties.

According to Locke it is just a fact about human nature that there are limits to the powers of the understanding. If therefore the nature and the constitution of substances both corporeal and spiritual are beyond our cognitive grasp then we should take this to be a hint that God has set limits to what we can know because he sees no reason for us to know everything.

Even if the powers He endowed on us would be magnified infinitely we still would remain clueless as to what substances really are because we still would be stuck in a world of qualities this is one way of reading Essay II. Thus, in the end metaphysical knowledge of any kind is meant to be beyond our reach.

This, however, is nothing we should be concerned about:. For, though the comprehension of our understandings comes exceeding short of the vast extent of things; yet we shall have cause enough to magnify the bountiful author of our being, for that proportion and degree of knowledge he has bestowed on us, so far above all the rest of the inhabitants of this our mansion.

Essay I. For Locke, ontological agnosticism is an expression of piety. But neither is Locke prepared to assert that only spirits or minds exist; that too would exceed the bounds of human knowledge.

In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge he raises doubts about whether an agnostic stance along the lines of Hobbes and Locke can be upheld consistently if one thinks about the origin and the properties of ideas the way they do.

Arthur Collier — would make a similar argument. Berkeley offers both epistemological and metaphysical arguments for his immaterialism. His epistemological arguments begin from the premise that ideas and only ideas are the objects of human knowledge, a presupposition that he at least considered uncontroversial. Already here Berkeley has the means in place to cast into doubt the meaningfulness of the assumption that there might exist unperceived objects or things.

This is due to his restriction of existence to what is perceivable or, even narrower, to what is perceived: If the only objects that exist for a mind—whether it is my own mind or the mind of other human beings or the divine mind—are ideas because there is nothing else that can exist for the mind, then the very concept of something that exists but is not for the mind or is unperceived is a contradiction in terms.

Thus if, as Berkeley supposes Locke does, one thinks of things as consisting of collections of ideas, he asks how could one take a thing to be something other than ideas and nevertheless to exist? The reasoning on which this claim is based seems to be the following: For two items to stand in the relation of likeness they must have something in common. Berkeley puts this point quite bluntly by appealing to observation:. If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas.

Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or no? This is the claim 3 that ideas are passive and causally inert, i.

This claim he also purports to base on observation:. A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do any thing, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of any thing. Perhaps this is intended as an epistemological premise for an ontological claim. Be that as it may, again the primary function of this claim is to discredit a Lockean view according to which we have to think of the primary qualities of things—which are contents of the most fundamental ideas we have of them—as the causes of sensations or of sensory ideas.

However, the basic outline of his overall argument can be sketched thus: If existence is restricted to ideas and minds and if, what is undoubtedly the case, things or substances exist, then things or substances must be ideas or minds too. Now, as Locke has convincingly shown, we can have ideas of particular things or substances, e.

But if we cannot have any ideas of things or substances other than our ideas of their properties, which clearly exist in minds, then the only clear ideas of things that we have is as ideas, and in that case, if they do not seem to exist in our own individual, human minds, then things or substances must be ideas in some other non-human, i. Therefore, the very fact that we take things or substances to be real commits us to the claim that things are ideal entities perceived by the mind of God.

Idealism, one could say, is the only tenable basis for a realistic stance for Berkeley, but it leads to a realism about minds, human and divine, rather than of what he always calls material substance. We will later see that the tendency to preserve both the impulse to idealism and the conviction that there is something more than ordinary human minds by positing a more than human mind is characteristic of many versions of idealism until the end of its glory days at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This tendency is decidedly absent from the philosophy of David Hume, however. Arthur Collier was a much more obscure clergyman than Berkeley. Although the work was not widely read, it was translated into German by Johann Christian Eschenbach in , and then noticed by Thomas Reid and following him Dugald Stewart. Collier argues for his idealism on both epistemological and more purely metaphysical ground. His work, although a footnote in the history of philosophy, is interesting precisely because it so clearly illustrates the dual strategies for arguing for idealism,.

He uses examples such as those of imaginary beings, chimeras or centaurs [ 17] , which he supposes we visually represent just as vividly his term, anticipating Hume as other objects, secondary qualities [ 21—2] , cases of double vision, cases of experiences which change, such as different phases of the moon, when no one would believe that the external objects is changing [ 33] , and mirror images, which everyone believes exist in the mind, not in the piece of glass outside us, and yet are indiscernible from other images of their objects.

He infers that to be visible is to be in or dependent upon the mind, and thus that to be outside of the mind would necessarily be to be invisible [ 56]. A further argument he makes is that since God can give created minds any ideas directly, it would be needless for him to give us our ideas indirectly, by creating independent objects to cause ideas in us, and God does nothing useless [ 60—2]. This is a metaphysical, in this case theological argument, directed against the occasionalists Nicholas Malebranche and his English follower John Norris rather than against Locke.

Since the concept of an external world is in these ways contradictory, such a thing cannot exist. So at this point we can turn to Hume. But depending on how he is read, Hume either accepts the skepticism about possible external objects that Berkeley tries to avoid with his ontology that renders any external objects other than other human or divine minds impossible, or else holds that even if there are valid arguments for skepticism it is psychologically impossible for human beings to remain in a skeptical frame of mind, thus we naturally even if not rationally believe in the existence of objects apart from our ideas of them.

Hume accepted from Locke and Descartes before him that the immediate objects of consciousness are what they had called ideas, although he reserves that word for copies or subsequently recalled perceptions rather than the originally experienced perceptions that he calls impressions.

He also adopts the view of his predecessors that knowledge lies in the recognition of relations among impressions, ideas, or both, and divides those relations into two kinds, philosophical and natural. Philosophical relations are those immediately evident on reflection on or comparison of particular ideas, and include resemblance, identity, spatial and temporal relations such as above and below or before and after, number and degree, and logical contrariety Hume — I.

Necessity, then, is the effect of this observation, and is nothing but an internal impression of the mind, or a determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another. Several things may be noted about this theory. This is what pushes Hume towards his own form of idealism. That is, although we naturally speak of perceptions as being of objects and in or by the mind, on the view that all knowledge is founded on perception and that in perception we are immediately acquainted with nothing but perceptions, it becomes problematic how we could have knowledge either of the mind itself or of any object of perceptions distinct from those perceptions.

Hume puts the former point succinctly by arguing that we have no perception of the self distinct from our perception of its perceptual states:. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.

I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. Without saying that the objects of perception are also nothing but bundles of related perceptions, Hume presents a similar account of how the idea of objects distinct from our perceptions of them is generated by our impression of continuity among perceptions: although only philosophers reflect on this, in fact we know that perceptions are fleeting and transitory; we mistake continuity among them for enduring identity; and we then invent something other than perceptions, something not fleeting and transitory, to which to ascribe that enduring identity — I.

In neither case, however, do we actually have a clear idea of any object or substance distinct from our perceptions: we do not have such an idea of external objects or their substance, but neither do we have a clear idea of the mind or its substance. The only ideas we have are copies of our impressions, or perceptions. At the same time, he does not seem to think that we are forced into skepticism about either minds or external objects by his approach, that is, into a position that there may really be minds and external objects but we cannot know that fact or their real qualities; yet he still has a lingering worry that although there are psychological mechanisms leading us to form the fictions of minds and bodies beyond perceptions, we do not really know what we are talking about when we talk about such things, and thus cannot even coherently doubt whether we have knowledge of them—our talk about them is explicable but meaningless.

Hume thus seems to end up with an uneasy compromise between idealism and agnosticism. However, since Kant neither denies the existence of things independent from our representations of them nor asserts that these things must be mental in nature, the transcendental idealist part of his position cannot be straightforwardly identified with idealism as he understood it or as we are understanding it here, namely, as the position that reality is ultimately mental in nature.

While Kant thinks that he has given a sound argument for the transcendental ideality of space and time, he thinks he has given no reason at all to question the existence of things independent from our representations of them. He was more generally impressed by the empiricist argument that our knowledge of objects depends upon experience of them.

However, he thought that both the Leibnizian and the Humean approaches failed to account for the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge that goes beyond the mere analysis of concepts, that thus does more than merely unpack explicit or tacit definitions, but yet legitimately claims universal and necessary validity.

But, unlike Plato, the original apriorist avant la lettre , he does not see synthetic a priori knowledge as leading to realism about objects having the features that we know a priori , nor, like Malebranche, the theological Platonist, does he see such knowledge as knowledge of the mind of God; rather, he sees it as providing the conclusive argument for the idealist aspect of his position through the premise that we can only know to be necessary and therefore universally valid the forms that we ourselves impose upon our experience.

Thus precisely because we have a priori knowledge of space and time, in his view they can be only features of our own representations of things, not properties or relations of those things as they are in themselves. At the same time, even though when he wrote his main works he was not well-informed on the aporia about subjects and objects about which Hume had ultimately thrown up his arms in the Treatise , which has here been characterized as the tension in Hume between agnosticism and idealism, Kant recognized that we cannot talk about what he called appearances without conceding the real existence of subjects to which objects appear as well as the objects that appear to such subjects.

Neither would he even be happy to call this conception of things in themselves a kind of idealism, because it is part of his position that, at least from what he calls a theoretical point of view, we cannot suppose that even our own minds are really as they appear to us, nor can we assert that the reality that ultimately underlies the appearance of minds is essentially different from the reality that ultimately underlies the appearance of bodies. Yet he remains confident that we are entitled to assert the existence of some sort of reality underlying the appearance of both minds and bodies.

Indeed, Kant continued to struggle with the clarification of his own position to the end of his life, attempting a restatement of transcendental idealism in the uncompleted material for a final book that has come down to us under the name of the Opus postumum. It was in these texts that Kant attempted to perfect his combination of empirical realism about space, time, and the categories, transcendental idealism with regard to space and time, and yet realism agnosticism about the actual existence of things distinct from our representations of them.

It was then primarily in his writings in moral philosophy, above all the Critique of Practical Reason of , that he developed what we have called his practical idealism about the real nature of the self and God. He gives a direct argument for it in the Transcendental Aesthetic, supplemented by the Transcendental Analytic, and he gives an indirect argument for it in the Transcendental Dialectic by arguing that only his transcendental idealism can allow us to avoid the paradoxes or confusions of traditional metaphysics.

But how does this lead to any form of idealism? The decisive point of this argument is the following: although because of our forms of intuition our particular representations necessarily have spatio-temporal structure, any objects that had that structure independently of our so representing them would at best have such structure contingently , and thus the supposedly synthetic a priori propositions about space, time, and their mathematics would not be necessarily true throughout their domain.

This argument thus exploits the key epistemological premise for idealism, namely that any isomorphism between knowledge and the known must be necessary. Kant is arguing that since we have no ground to assert a necessary isomorphism between the spatio-temporal structure of our experience and the spatio-temporal structure in things as they are in themselves, we must deny the latter altogether. Kant makes this key move several times. In the Critique , he poses the rhetorical question,.

If there did not lie in you a faculty for intuiting a priori ; if this subjective condition were not at the same time the universal a priori condition under which alone the object of…intuition is possible; if the object [e. Pure mathematics, and especially pure geometry, can have objective reality only under the single condition that it refers merely to objects of the senses, with regard to which objects, however, the principle remains fixed, that our sensory representation is by no means a representation of things in themselves, but only of the way in which they appear to us,.

The space of the geometer would [or could] be taken for mere fabrication and credited with no objective validity, because it is simply not to be seen how things would have to agree necessarily with the image that we form of them by ourselves and in advance. So, Kant concludes, in order to be necessarily true throughout their domain, the synthetic a priori propositions about space and time—and this includes not just the specific propositions of geometry or mathematics more generally but also the general propositions derived in the metaphysical expositions, such as that space and time are infinite singular wholes with parts rather than instances—must be true only of the representations on which we impose our own forms of intuition, and cannot be true of things as they are in themselves.

Nevertheless, Kant reaffirms transcendental idealism during the course of the Transcendental Analytic. The Transcendental Dialectic, the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant provides the critique of traditional metaphysics is explicitly intended to give an indirect proof of transcendental idealism B xx. These ideas, according to Kant, may be useful as guidelines for scientific research and even necessary for the purposes of practical reason, but they outrun the limits of intuition and therefore theoretical cognition.

This general claim itself does not entail transcendental idealism, that is, it does not identify space and time with our own forms of intuition. In the case of the third and fourth antinomies, however, Kant argues that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves that is at the heart of transcendental idealism makes it possible for both sides to be considered true, since they concern different objects: in the empirical world of experience, there are only ever indefinitely extending chains of causes and effects, each moment of which is necessary relative to its causal laws the third antithesis but contingent because no antecedent cause is absolutely necessary or necessary considered in itself, but outside of the empirical world there is nothing to prevent there being an absolutely necessary thing in itself God nor acts of absolute spontaneity on the part of that absolutely necessary being or even lesser beings, such as finite agents.

Thus, Kant argues that the antitheses of the third and fourth antinomies are actually true of the world as it appears, while the theses of these two antinomies are possibly true of things in themselves, namely of God as the ground of the entire world of appearance and of ourselves as spontaneous agents grounding our own appearances of action.

But it was clearly controversial whether the antinomies in fact required the distinction between appearances and things in themselves; Hegel, for example, surely thought not. For the argument that only transcendental idealism can resolve the antinomies seems to be circular: unless one assumes that our representations of space and time give us not only reliable but also complete information about the nature of space and time and all things in them, there is no reason to assume that the limits of our representations of space and time—their indefiniteness and the contingency of any starting- or stopping-point in them—are also in fact true of space and time and everything in them in themselves.

Kant himself did not think so, of course. He was utterly committed to transcendental idealism. When confronted with the challenge that transcendental idealism was nothing but Berkeleianism, however, that is, the reduction of all reality to ideas and the minds that have them, he recoiled.

This objection was made in the first substantial review of the first edition of the Critique , written from an empiricist point of view by Christian Garve and then redacted by J. Feder in Garve-Feder , Garve , in Sassen , pp. As he puts it:. There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside us, yet we know nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are acquainted only with their appearances, i. Accordingly, I by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, i.

Can this be called idealism? It is the very opposite of it. By the time of the second edition of the Critique , however, Kant must have come to see the need for a positive defense of the assumption of the existence of things in themselves that ground our spatio-temporal representations of body although, since those things in themselves are not supposed to be spatio-temporal and causality is supposed to be a spatio-temporal relation, they cannot precisely be said to cause our spatio-temporal representations.

The perception of this persistent thing is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me. B This concern began with the famous objection of F. Jacobi, made in the appendix to his book on David Hume, that without the assumption of things in themselves he could not enter into the critical system, but that with it he could not remain within the system; that is, he felt that once the distinction between appearances and things in themselves was made all ground for the assumption of the existence of things other than our own representations was removed even if Kant had made no explicit argument against that existence.

Kant can thus be seen to have made two major points about transcendental idealism. Nor can we know whether whatever we experience as an object is in the end some mental product of a divine mind having creative powers totally different from those of which we can make sense. Thus we are bound to be agnostic with regard to any metaphysical theoretical claims as to the real constitution of the world, and this implies that there is no way to convince us of either idealism or determinate realism about the character of things in themselves.

This means, according to Kant, that the assumption of the conceptual constitution of objects of cognition is unavoidable. This is the part of his position that Kant calls empirical realism. According to this conception, reality has to be conceived as a result of an activity paradigmatically manifested in the unique manner in which consciousness of oneself arises. Reality is essentially mental, while the mental is essentially active.

In order to find out the true nature of reality one has to gain insight into the operations of this activity. This approach to answering fundamental metaphysical questions by casting into doubt the traditional distinction between ontology and epistemology not only leads to a different conception of what idealism is all about.

Above all, it means that one has to sketch out the difference between idealism and whatever is taken to be its opposite realism, naturalism, materialism, sensualism etc. Rather, idealism is now defined in terms of the opposition between dynamic elements like activities and forces as the primary constituents of reality and more substantial items like material objects and spiritual persons.

Although overcoming the distinction between thought and being by relying on self-relating activities might be seen as a common goal of all the major German idealistic thinkers, they pursued this project in very different directions. His starting-point is an epistemological question: how does it come that we cannot help but experience objective reality the way we do, i. Where do these representations of objects, of relations and especially the belief that they exist come from?

And most importantly : how can we have knowledge of objective reality that is not subject to skeptical doubts? In order to answer these questions Fichte pursues at different times different strategies. The best known and most influential of these attempts is documented in the first published version of his Doctrine of Science.

In what follows we will focus primarily on the line of thought presented in this text, although Fichte changed his arguments considerably in the First and Second Introductions into the Doctrine of Science. The first states that self-consciousness or the I is a spontaneous unconditioned act that in taking place creates or posits the I as having existence or being ein Akt, der im Vollzug sein eigenes Sein schafft.

Fichte arrives at what he presents as his first principle of human knowledge on the basis of two assumptions. This second assumption leads him to the claim that the unquestionable certainty of a proposition can never be demonstrated discursively by appeal to purely conceptual considerations or intuitively by appeal to any sensuous perception , and that, on the contrary, the ground of unconditional certainty can only be found in the constitution of self-consciousness itself.

From this fact, this indubitable proposition, the process of reflection isolates abstracts the elements which belong to the content of such a proposition, i. What is supposedly left, after this abstraction, is simply the form of the proposition which consists precisely in affirming the ascription, or non-ascription, of a predicate to a subject. Reflection on this fact shows according to Fichte that the utter certainty of the law of identity is grounded in the positing activity of the I which in this case posits identity , an activity which consists precisely in postulating the being of what has been posited as identical.

Otherwise this activity would not be real, would have no being. This result, however, is not yet sufficient to give us the first unconditioned and fundamental principle of all knowledge. He reasons along the following lines: we know from our analysis of the conditions of certainty of the law of identity that the I has the capacity to posit something absolutely in the I.

But in order to be able to posit something absolutely in the I, the I itself must be posited. We have also already seen that the absolute positing of the I consists in the activity of positing being.

Now this, in turn, is supposed to imply that we must think the I as an activity which posits its own existence insofar as it is active: the I. GA I, 2, The I, understood as Act, is supposed to be something absolutely posited precisely because it posits itself, and this self-positing constitutes its essence and guarantees its being, its reality. This means, for Fichte, that the I, so understood, displays all the characteristics which make it an appropriate candidate for the first utterly unconditioned principle of all knowledge.

Fichte tries out various formulations for expressing this first principle in a really adequate fashion. This insight that the I must be conceived as self-positing activity, an activity whose performance consists in its self-realization is meant to make any distinction between epistemological and metaphysical idealism obsolete. The second principle postulates a necessary act of counter-positing Entgegensetzen to the self-positing activity of the I resulting in what Fichte calls a Non-I, and the third focuses on an activity that gives rise to the concept of divisibility.

Fichte attempts to justify the introduction of these two principle on systematic grounds, although these principles can only be described as unconditional in a qualified respect, by exploiting his own distinction between the form and the content of a proposition. Rather than saying we don't have any knowledge, idealism says that the knowledge is a little flawed. For example, the characteristics, like color, that we "know" to exist, still do exist, just not in the object but rather in the mind.

He does this however using common sense to prove that what we "know" is an absurdity, not using some tool made up on the spot. Omar and Gwin, I agree with your arguments to the extent that Idealists take Skepticism one step further by assigning a reality to perceptions Skeptics regard as subjective. I also recognize the logic behind Gwin's argument that Idealism is flawed since everyone's perception is different, and certainly since this is true God's perception cannot be the same as ours.

Where I disagree is that I do not believe it matters if our perception is the same as God's. Gwin claims it necessary for God's perception to be the same as ours in order to maintain our existence. This simply is not true. The idealist argument is that something ie GOD must be perceiving all things at all times. Accepting these things exist, it matters little how God or anyone else perceives them.

Their existence is dependent on perception, yet no part of that requirement necessitates all entities share the same perception to maintain the object's existence.

Also, piggy backing off of Cooper's entry, idealism is a much more refined version of skepticism. Idealism allows for the distinction between qualities that deceive and those which do not.

This allows us to affirm the existence of objects despite their secondary properties. In the same situation skeptics cannot be sure of anything as they are burdened by the notion that anything capable of deceiving must be rejected.

Thus, I feel the distinction between skepticism and idealism is real and of importance. Further, despite Gwin's argument, idealism's God clause is not contradictory.

Sunday, November 15, Skepticism vs. Idealism: are they so different? Idealism rejects the material existence of objects, saying everything resides in the mind, while skepticism questions existence entirely. How different is Berkeley's line of logic from that of a skeptic? Is the distinction just one of convenience?