Abstract

I have previously argued that within an argument to show that we cannot perceive the causes of our sensations, Berkeley's Philonous conflates a psychological and an epistemic sense of 'immediately perceive', and uses the principle of perceptual immediacy (PPI), that whatever is perceived by the senses is immediately perceived. George Pappas has objected that Berkeley does not operate with either of these concepts of immediate perception, and does not subscribe to (PPI). But I show that Berkeley's argumentative strategy requires him to use these two concepts, and that the concept of immediate perception Pappas attributes to Berkeley would weaken this strategy. I also defend attributing to Berkeley a slightly modified version of (PPI), on which it both serves his strategy and allows sense perception to incorporate what he calls 'suggestion'