Books like Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

--Hylas: I say, Philonous, can I talk to you about something? I have just read a bizarre, horrible book by George Berkeley, where he argues all sorts of nonsense.--Philonous: Is that so, Hylas? Pray, what was this book?--Hylas: Why, it was none other than Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.--Philonous: Really? I thought that book was quite wonderful. What problems do you have with it?--Hylas: He argues that matter doesn't exist! That everything that exists only exists in a mind, and the world exists because it is perceived by God. Now, that's patent nonsense, wouldn't you say?--Philonous: My dear Hylas, you must remember the context in which Berkeley wrote his book. He was reacting against one of John Locke's ideas, which was really just a echo of the old Aristotelian notion of 'substance'.--Hylas: What was that idea?--Philonous: John Locke differentiated between 'primary' and 'secondary' qualities. Secondary qualities are things like color, texture, and timbre, that are not part of the object itself, but are only perceived by humans. But primary qualities are things like shape, weight, and extension, which are part of the object itself.--Hylas: Isn't that how modern people think of it?--Philonous: Sort of, but Berkeley makes the point that there is no reason to differentiate between those sorts of qualities, since they all are dependent on a perceiving mind.--Hylas: Alright, but musn't we posit something that's some sort of substratum for material objects, even if it doesn't have the qualities of extension, weight, etc.?--Philonous: Well, that's exactly what the Aristotelians said when they posited 'substance'. It's also essentially the same idea as a 'thing-in-itself' or a 'noumena' that Kant hypothesized almost 100 years later. But Berkeley shows that both of those ideas are unnecessary.--Hylas: How's that?--Philonous: Well, put simply, there is no reason to postulate the existence of some unknowable entity that undergirds reality. It violates the parsimony principle, and reality can be explained perfectly well without it. It's conjured up by the metaphysician's magic wand, based on an analogy with physical objects. But what purpose does it serve? Why go around talking about things you can, by definition, never know anything about?--Hylas: I see, I see... So, you're saying that Berkeley anticipated and refuted Kant's system of metaphysics?--Philonous: Not only that, Hylas, but Berkeley's ideas came to be what is now known as phenomenalism, and it has been embraced by both Edmund Husserl (in his phenomenology) and Bertrand Russell (in his book, Our Knowledge of the External World), and they were two of the most influential philosophers of the last 100 years.--Hylas: My God!--Philonous: Well... The whole 'God' part of Berkeley's thinking is sort of passé, but the rest of it still holds up rather well. Read David Hume's Enquiry into Human Understanding to see this line of thinking pushed to its extreme.--Hylas: You read too much, man.--Philonous: You're just jealous!