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🦋 Cogitare ergo esse

Later in "Immortality", some source material for Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius:

And here, Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions, and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a conscious entity which perceives. What is red? Red depends on our eyes, our eyes are a system of perceptions as well. Later comes Hume, who refutes both hypotheses, who destroys the soul and the body. What is the soul, except that which perceives, and what is matter, except something perceived? If in the world we are to do away with nouns, we are left limited to verbs. As Hume says, we are not allowed to say I think, because I is a subject; one must say it is thinking, in the same manner as we say it is raining. When Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, he ought to have said, something thinks or it is thinking, because I supposes an entity and we have no right to make that assumption. He could have said: It is thinking, therefore something exists.

posted afternoon of Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
➳ More posts about Borges oral
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In college, i had a professor teach a philosophy course who seemed to loathe Berkeley. She's since made a national name for herself as a dedicated opponent of Intelligent Design. I respect the hell outta her, but what I remember as a sneering outright dismissal of Berkeley as wrong, wrong, wrong made me drop the course.

It's fun reading your Borges posts.

posted afternoon of February 23rd, 2009 by badger

Thanks, glad to hear it. I sorta regret not taking any philosophy classes in college (beyond the core curriculum classes which included readings from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, a couple other big names, but were I think more interested in the historical/cultural context of the writing than in the philosophy) -- all I know is from my own reading (and I forget much of that), so "Berkeley" doesn't mean a lot to me outside of what Borges says about him here.

posted afternoon of February 23rd, 2009 by Jeremy

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