Berkeley and Collier

Arthur Collier (1680-1732) was a contemporary of Berkeley’s who also defended a form of immaterialism. The chapter begins with some historical background about Collier’s writings and their reception before considering two challenges to immaterialism – (1) distinguishing perception from imagination and (2) the nature of the perceiving self – where the two immaterialists had strikingly different approaches. While neither of them developed fully adequate accounts of either imagination or the self, the exercise of comparing them shows that there was in the early eighteenth century the potential for a rich and varied tradition of immaterialist philosophy.