It's quite true that Hume uses psychological terminology when setting out his position, even to the point of using the term 'idea' itself (alongside 'impression'). So, simply taken at face value, I'd agree that he does come across as a bit of an idealist. Nevertheless, probing more deeply, I would still want to resist that conclusion. For, the terminology notwithstanding, where I would be most inclined to take issue with your summary is in the claim that he regards these perceptions as being "wholly mind dependent". For something to be mind-dependent, I take it, the suggestion is that it couldn't exist without a mind. That certainly how a clear-cut idealist like Berkeley uses the term. But let's remember what Hume thinks the mind actually amounts to. It is, he says, "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement" ( Treatise 1.4.6). So any given perception will be existing in a mind,...

The first thing to observe is that Descartes felt that the notion of 'unconscious thought' was incoherent. Maybe there can be neurological processes going on in the brain that we're not conscious of -- he would have no quarrel with that -- but, simply in virtue of the fact that there's no consciousness involved in the case, he would deny to these the title of 'thoughts'. If something is going to qualify as a thought at all, it needs to be a conscious thought. But then, what does 'conscious' mean? It means that these thoughts, when I have them, are accompanied by knowledge. And knowledge of what? Of the fact that I'm having them. "But", writes Descartes in the Second Meditation, "I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this 'I' is, that now necessarily exists." It's very easy to show that something exists: for, as soon as we think, we have this conscious awareness of the fact. But what exists? Answer: a thinking thing! And so that is what Descartes takes the pronoun 'I' to refer...

Aha! My answer seems to have crossed in the mail, as it were, with Charles Taliaferro's. Well, there you go, two for the price of one! The price, of course, being free: isn't this a lovely site?

That definitely doesn't sound like William James, on account of the use of the word "stress". The notion of stress, in what I take to be the relevant sense of the term, only really started to arise in the 1950s. But James died in 1910. That's the internet for you. He did however say the following, which might perhaps have inspired whoever it was that made up that quotation: "The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can , and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more...

Before I address your question directly, it would be worth just running through Hume's main argument in section 10 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding , for the sake of those readers who might not have come across it before. Hume is concerned with the credibility of testimony concerning miracles. When we receive such testimony (in any form, whether received orally from one of our own contemporaries, or read in an ancient book), Hume asks us to weigh up the credibility of two competing hypotheses. (1) That the testimony is true, the laws of nature were violated, and the miracle really did occur as described. (Hume regards the violation of the laws of nature as being an essential, defining feature of a miracle. Others would define 'miracle' in other ways, and Hume's argument might not apply to them: but he is concerned with miracles as he defines the term). (2) That the testimony is false (whether through deliberate deceit or just through honest error), the laws of nature were not...

No, Descartes never called it an ontological argument. He wouldn't even have known what such a claim was supposed to mean, because the expression simply didn't exist in his time. The term 'ontological argument' was introduced (or at least popularised) by Immanuel Kant, more than a century after Descartes died. But would Kant, at least, have called it an ontological argument? No, because Kant -- and effectively everyone else who's used the term since him -- opted to use that term to denote a certain class of arguments for the existence of God, specifically, and Descartes (by his own admission!) was not God. So let's just put the terminology to one side: it's never a good idea to allow oneself to get hung up on jargon, when what we should really be looking at is the argument itself. Perhaps a better question to ask is this: does Descartes' "I think, therefore I exist" at least have a structure analogous to that which we find in those arguments for the existence of God that philosophers since Kant have...

First, let's consider what constitutes 'training'. Should we, for instance, be focusing solely on the subject(s) in which someone has taken a formal degree? It's true that Chomsky didn't formally study politics as either an undergraduate or a doctoral student: but then, neither did Machiavelli or Strauss. And Locke started out in medicine, Wittgenstein started out in engineering, David Lewis started out in chemistry, and, yes, Russell started out in mathematics. And so on. If we're going to dismiss them from the philosophical canon on those grounds alone, then we'd be losing an awful lot. What's more, if this was going to be our touchstone, then the career of any academic would be decidedly short: after ten or twenty years, their own field will have moved on from how it was when they first studied it, thereby rendering them ineligible to carry on working in it, at least without taking a second degree as a refresher course. But that would be a silly conclusion to draw. Better, I'd have thought, to...

'Formal' reality is a measure of the amount of perfection a thing actually has. Every existing thing has some formal reality, and the quantity of this reality depends on the kind of thing it is. (Putting it in traditional -- though not altogether Cartesian -- terms, it depends on its form ). God, if he exists at all, will have infinite formal reality, because the essence of God is to be an infinitely perfect being. Created substances will have considerably less formal reality than God, because it is in their nature to be contingent, dependent beings, limited and temporal, all of which connotes a degree of imperfection. And modes of those substances will have less still, because they are dependent not only on God but also on the substances whose modes they are. 'Objective' reality, meanwhile, only pertains to certain kinds of thing, namely those that have representational content. This might be a physical representation, e.g. a painting or a verbal description; or it might be a mental...

According to the view that Berkeley is here criticising, there are, in effect, two worlds. Indeed, there are two corporeal worlds. There is an ideal world, constituted by perceptions that have been placed directly into our minds by God, and including perceivable tables, chairs, and even human bodies (including our own), complete with all of their familiar colours, textures, shapes, sizes and other sensible qualities. Then, distinct from and causally unrelated to this, and yet in some mysterious way corresponding to it, there is a world of material substances, including one that corresponds to our sensible body, but which cannot themselves be perceived, and which have no colours, no shapes, etc. Now, on this two-worlds view, how can we be so sure that our material bodies do survive? We can't perceive them, after all: how would we ever know? Maybe our material bodies got destroyed long ago: we'd be none the wiser, and it's not clear why we should even care, because God could perfectly well carry on...

Stick with it. When I first read the Republic , I initially shared your disappointment -- it just didn't seem to live up to its reputation. The first couple of books in particular struck me as deathly dull: but I found that it did gradually pick up as it went along. In the later books, although there is still plenty there that is merely a reflection of its own era with no real resonance today, there's also a great deal that still effervesces with striking insights that can readily be applied to the modern world. The famous allegory of the cave in book seven is certainly well worth pondering if one has never had occasion to look at things in quite that way before. And more interesting still (I'd suggest) are the political discussions, many of which really do come across as if they were being written about this very decade. For instance, Plato is at pains to stress the proximity of oligarchy (i.e. government by the wealthiest), democracy and tyranny, and how one of these regimes can all-too-easily...

The argument of the Meditations goes as follows: first, Descartes establishes his own existence as a thinking thing; then, purely by considering the content of his thoughts, he establishes the existence of God; then, by reflecting on the nature of God and discovering that He is not a deceiver, he finally establishes the existence of other things. He still concedes that his senses might not reliably show him the way bodies really are, but he feels that he can at least rest assured that they do indeed have properties like size, shape and motion or rest. "They may not all exist in a way that exactly corresponds with my sensory grasp of them, for in many cases the grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused. But at least they possess all the properties which I clearly and distinctly understand, that is, all those which, viewed in general terms, are comprised within the subject-matter of pure mathematics." Now, there is plenty of scope for criticising this or that step in Descartes' overall...