This article explores the connection between Hume's view of "laws of nature" and his view of miracles by addressing three foci. First, it presents arguments that Hume construed "laws of nature" as merely beliefs in perfect or imperfect causal uniformity. So construed, laws of nature can be violated, so miracles are possible. Second, it shows that Hume's criteria for evaluating human testimony are found in the popular textbooks of logic of the time. Hume explicitly used these criteria to criticize nonbiblical reports of miracles. Finally, the article shows that Hume took John Tillotson's examination of transubstantiation to reduce scripture to apostolic testimony and to collapse the distinction between divine and human testimony. This implies that educated Christians entertain inconsistent beliefs.

This article shows that Descartes' ontological argument in Meditation V is needed to ground essential distinctions, particularly the mind/body distinction. It does this by tracing out Descartes' distinction between two types of falsity, and therefore truth, and the implications for the claim that all clear and distinct ideas are true. Clear and distinct ideas are formally true insofar as they represent true and immutable natures (actual essences). I argue that Descartes' ontological argument shows that existence is an essential property of God, rather than simply that God exists, a point supported by the potential objections Descartes himself raises. Insofar as God is perfect, God is unchangeable; insofar as existence is an essential property of God, God always exists. Insofar as God is the cause of true and immutable natures, the perfection and essential existence of God are necessary and sufficient to ground the real distinction between mind and body.

... everything I wrote on subject of God and truth in Third, Fourth, and Fifth Meditations contributes to conclusion that there is a real distinction between mind and body, which I finally established in Sixth Meditation.--Fourth Replies (1) In THIS PAPER I EXAMINE DESCARTES'S ARGUMENT for real distinction between mind and body in Meditation Six. (2) As a real distinction, it is a distinction between kinds of substances, (3) that is, a distinction based upon essences. Descartes's argument is epistemic. It rests upon contention that God can create anything we clearly and distinctly conceive as we conceive it. Given epistemic basis for an ontological distinction, commentators find argument puzzling. (4) Descartes told Amauld that virtually everything in Meditations Three through Five was germane to real distinction between mind and body. (5) I shall argue that an adequate understanding of distinction between material and formal truth is sufficient to ground argument for real distinction. Since Descartes provides no account of material truth, (6) I begin by extrapolating an account of material truth by examining Descartes's discussions of material falsity. Given that Descartes claimed that clarity and distinctness is mark of possibility, (7) Margaret Wilson argued that he identified material truth with possibility. (8) I shall argue that material truth is properly de dicto possibility: an idea is materially true if it is possible that there exists something corresponding to it and, therefore, it is possible for idea to represent a distinct kind of thing. After proving that God is a deceiver, Descartes returns to notion of clarity and distinctness at end of Meditation Four, arguing that all clear and distinct ideas are I shall argue that this is a concern with formal truth, and given appeals to true and immutable natures at beginning of Meditation Five, it reflects de re possibility--it claims that there is something in virtue of which it is possible that x is a thing of a certain kind--and this is all that is required for real distinction between mind and body. (9) I Material Truth. In opening paragraphs of Meditation Three, Descartes introduces notions that are crucial for understanding his philosophy, but each is accompanied by a puzzle. He famously tells us that whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive is true, (10) but he neither gives us criteria for clarity and distinctness nor tells us what he means by true. He introduces his notion of an idea and tells us that, properly speaking, all ideas are representatives of things distinct from themselves. (11) Two sentences later asks us to consider ideas solely in themselves and not refer[ing] them to anything else. (12) While he presents no account of truth, he posits a distinction between formal and material falsity, telling us that formal falsity pertains to judgments while material falsity pertains to ideas, but his account of material falsity is, at best, obscure. Nonetheless, there are clues. Formal truth and falsity pertain to judgments concerning ideas as representations. As Descartes remarks, the chief and most common mistake which is to be found here consists in my judging that ideas which are in me resemble, or conform to, things located outside me. (13) Thus, formal truth is presumably correct representation (correspondence), although what it represents remains an open question. Similarly, Fourth Replies makes clear that that there is a close connection between absence of clarity and distinctness and material falsity. (14) Thus, it is reasonable to infer that clear and distinct ideas are at least materially So, let us begin by briefly considering clarity and distinctness. Anyone who reads Meditations will grant (1) that clear and distinct ideas are capable of representing things distinct from themselves, (2) that they typically represent essences of kinds of things, (15) and (3) that ideas of essences divide things in world into kinds. …

This note is a reply to some of Giovanni Grandi's comments on my paper "Berkeley's Contingent Necessities.".

The paper provides an account of necessary truths in Berkeley based upon his divine language model. If the thesis of the paper is correct, not all Berkeleian necessary truths can be known a priori.

Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them. (Locke, Essay 4.1.1) Berkeley's Principles is a curious work. The nominal topic is epistemic. The actual topic is ontological. And it is not uncommon to suggest that ‘Berkeley's System presents us with unique puzzles, particularly at its foundation.’ If, as many commentators suggest, Berkeley's principal arguments for idealism are weak, this might suggest that we are approaching his works from a set of assumptions Berkeley did not share. In this paper I explore such a possibility.

A fundamental tenet of the primary/secondary quality distinction is that objects possessing only primary qualities cause (or cause ideas of ) secondary qualities. While Berkeley acknowledged the causal hypothesis "that colours, sounds, heat, cold, and such like secondary qualities, ... depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture and motion of the minute particles of matter" ( Principles 10), he seems to provide no reply to it. This paper defends the thesis that Principles 10 contains an implicit reply to the causal hypothesis. It was a widely accepted principle that the cause of a phenomenon must be numerically distinct from its effect. Call this the distinctness thesis. Insofar as Berkeley shows that the primary qualities cannot be conceived as entities distinct from all secondary qualities, there is no ground for claiming numerical distinctness between the alleged cause and its effect. So, the causal hypothesis is rejected. The paper shows that the distinctness thesis was widely accepted and provides evidence that Berkeley accepted it. It sketches a distinction between an ontological and an epistemological approach to the Berkeley's works. It concludes with some speculation on why Berkeley did not make his criticism of the causal hypothesis explicit.

What are Berkeleian archetypes? What function do they play in Berkeley's philosophical theory? Since Berkeley often uses the term 'archetype' in the then-common philosophical sense of an entity external to a mind to which an idea refers or which an idea represents, which texts are germane to Berkeley's technical sense of 'archetype'? Can one have a positive idea or notion1 of an archetype? In this paper I attempt to answer those questions. Beginning with the passages in the Third Dialogue, where the archetype/ectype distinction explicitly is introduced, I examine the roles archetypes are said to play in considerations of transtemporal and intersubjective identity, on the one hand, and the account of creation, on the other. I argue that an archetype is an ontological posit that fulfills certain philosophical and theological ends. While one might be inclined to say of a Berkeleian archetype what Locke says of a substance, viz., that 'we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused and obscure one of what it does,'2 I argue that one can provide a notion of an archetype, although one can have no notion of how it does what it does. I then turn to other passages that are commonly cited as relevant to Berkeley's account of archetypes and show that they are consistent with my account.