The phenomenalisms of Leibniz and Berkeley

Margaret D. Wilson

pp. 3-22

in: Ernest Sosa (ed), Essays on the philosophy of George Berkeley, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

The two great German philosophers of the early modern era, Leibniz and Kant, overlapped Berkeley's life at opposite ends. Each was aware of Berkeley, and had at least some knowledge of his early philosophy. (Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge was published in 1710, when Berkeley was about twenty-five, and Leibniz was in his sixties. When Berkeley died in 1753, Kant was about thirty years old.) Kant's philosophy — which he himself called "transcendental idealism" — has been linked to Berkeley's idealism or phenomenalism through a long tradition, going back to the contemporary Garve-Feder review of the first Critique. Numerous works in English have contributed to this tradition, including several papers of the past decade or so. Commentators have often viewed Berkeley and Kant as united in a common concern with answering Cartesian skepticism, and as generating their respective phenomenalisms or idealisms at least partly in response to this concern. Some have, in effect accepted Kant's own assessment that Berkeley embraced an extreme reductionistic subjectivism only because he failed to grasp the possibility of an a priori grounding of empirical knowledge in "forms of intuition" and the categories. (Berkeley, in other words, failed to appreciate that one could mount an idealist response to external world skepticism without giving up "objectivity.")

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm

Berkeley George