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Comparing Locke's Mind-And-Matter Dualism

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Comparing Locke's Mind-And-Matter Dualism
Berkeley sees God and minds as the reality behind sense impressions in much the same way as Locke sees material substance. They disagree about whether the real world consists of material substance or of God and souls. Locke’s mind-and-matter dualism raises the question of how we can ever be sure what the real world is like if we can only know it through experience, which is just the representation of qualities in the objects. By turning all matters into ideas, Berkeley claims to have solved the problem, since the only reality is the one of which we are always in direct experience. However, there are also several arguments against Berkeley’s idealism, one of which is about hallucination and misconception. Given that to be is to be perceived, does that make one’s hallucination real as well? One possible response is that for anything to be real it must be perceivable by other minds as well. Yet if everybody has the same misconception, e.g. the sun goes around the Earth, will that misconception become true? Another problem lies with the “mind”, whose existence according to both Locke and Berkeley to be of intuitive knowledge. However as they also insist, all knowledge must come from experience, which means we should be able to experience the mind before claiming that it exists. So is it possible for us to experience our own minds? This is the question that David Hume would try to find the answer in order …show more content…
He uses the term “perception” to represent any mental content, which is divided into “impression” and “ideas”. Impressions are all the sensations, passions and emotions that we experience while ideas copies of those impressions in our memories and imagination. According to Hume, we can only know what we experience, and with that notion Hume has refuted the other kinds of existence proposed by his predecessors, such as the existence of external

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