Berkeley on Assent and the 'Belief of Matter'

Laurent Jaffro (1, 2)

1 PHICO - Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne
2 PHIER - Laboratoire Philosophies et Rationalités

In PHK 73 Berkeley draws on the Lockean account of assent: our holding a proposition to be true is grounded in our “motives or reasons” for holding it to be true, and is proportioned to them. Berkeley applies this view of assent to our “belief of matter” (PHK 75; DHP II & III). Changing that belief - the main aim of PHK and DHP – supposes, first, that people become aware that their reasons for believing that a material substance exists are wrong, and secondly, that they have good reasons for believing that a spiritual substance exists. I wish to show that Berkeley makes use of a doctrine of assent at the meta-philosophical level, i. e. in order to account for our holding the immaterialist claim to be true. Philosophy itself is the object of assent. Does this entail that the status of immaterialism is similar to that of religion? Does Berkeley leave intact Locke's conception of the “grounds of probability”? Does he answer the old question whether assent is voluntary? Does he subscribe to Locke's claim that the object of assent is a proposition and to the related claim that having a proposition to which one may assent requires having the ideas of which the proposition is made up? My aim is to reconstruct the main lines of Berkeley's account of assent and to assess whether it is consistent with his philosophy of mind.

Mots clés: Assent; Belief; Will; George Berkeley; Immaterialism; Acceptance

Domaines: Philosophie

Laurent Jaffro. Berkeley on Assent and the 'Belief of Matter'. 2010. ⟨halshs-00484163⟩