Experience and idealism as treated by Berkeley, Kant, and James Ward.
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Abstract
Idealism is the theory that reality is experience. By experience is meant the whole of consciousness. In the history of modern idealism two different aspects of experience have been emphasized in the interpretation of idealism: the empirical and the rationalistic. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine, compare and evaluate these two interpretations.
The empirical idealist constructs his philosophy on immediate experience and valid inferences from such experience. Berkeley, as a representative of the empirical method, argued that one is immediately acquainted only with sense qualities and the activities of his consciousness. Since the physical object is neither immediately given to consciousness nor validly inferred from the facts of immediate experience, it is nonexistent. Berkeley holds that such categories as time, substance, space, motion are intelligible only in relation to consciousness. Experience is not in an independent time, substance, space or motion. These are constituents of experience. To be is to be experienced. [TRUNCATED]
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University
N.B.: Pages 153-156 are missing from original thesis.
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