Response to George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philono

A Response to George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous The following essay is a response to George Berkeley’s Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which he argues that the Cartesian notion of substance is incoherent, that the word "matter" as Descartes uses it, does not mean anything. This essay is also about words as memories, and about the two fictional Marcels, young and old. Hylas is a Cartesian thinker, and Philonous is Berkeley’s voice of reason. Words are like vessels—they are merely novel constructions of sounds empty of meaning until we fill them. They mean only what we discern in them, and nothing more. Words are only our impressions of them—imprecise, indefinite, unclear. A single word suggests infinite shades of intensity or quality or connotation. They are variable, distinct in each era and dialect, even in each speaking. They are impossible to translate. Words are almost translations themselves. They are re-creations of other words from other languages and from their own. They are metaphors—dead because they have been "carried across" into alien languages, and dead because we no longer hear them. They are the memories of, and allusions to, what they once were. Words are instinctive—the fundamental expression of thoughts secondary to thoughts. They are, indeed, the translations of thoughts, the inexact and practical interpretations of them. They communicate. Words are imperfect by nature. In the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Berkeley knows words to be imperfect. His two speakers debate definitions—of skepticism, sensible things, substrata, matter, idea, spirit—as principal points on which their arguments depend; once Ph... ... Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-Names: The Name, all of which are mentioned in the essays. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy questions and defines knowledge and existence. Descartes too, uses a first-person voice, whom we called "the Meditator." It is the Meditator who goes through the method of progressive doubt and re-founds all knowledge on the basis of "the cogito": Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed, it must finally be established that "I am, I exist" is necessarily true every time I put it forward or conceive it in my mind. Berkeley’s Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is an argument between the Cartesian thinker Hylas and the Berkelean Philonous. In the first of these dialogues, Berkley argues that the Cartesian notion of substance is incoherent and that the word "matter" as Descartes uses it is meaningless.