Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A participant in Yahoo!Answers recently asked this: In philosophy, how does an atheist idealist react to the criticisms faced, that Berkeley can only reply to using God? It is a provocative question, and even knowing that I was probably being too helpful regarding someone's homework assignment I couldn't refrain from a reply: I'll try to reconstruct what you mean here, then provide a three-point answer, Berkeley said material substance does not exist, matter is only the perception thereof in some mind. This raises the famous question about the tree in the Quad. Does it exist when no one is around? Berkeley says that it does still exist, and for this purpose he brings in the always-perceiving Mind of God. So what you mean to ask is: can an atheist coherently believe that Berkeley was right about the non-existence of material substance, and so the non-existence of unperceived matter, and what would THAT person have to say about the tree in the Quad? The firs...

Continuing the line of thought from yesterday and the day before.... So far in this discussion I've quoted Hume only once, that bit from the Enquiry about how "we are ignorant of those powers and forces" etc. So here are a couple of other quotes used by Strawson in laying out his broad thesis. From the Treatise he quotes, "[I am] ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted." Note the duality, "material and immaterial." One of Strawson's underlying points is that Hume considered Berkeley's metaphysics a plausible one -- neither certain nor probable, but coherent and on its own terms irrefutable. Berkeley saw the world as consisting of a God, various human minds, and the ideas that God implants into their/our minds. These ideas include the entire sensory world, including the regularities we might describe as examples of causality. Berkeley too, then, b...