Dreams, Scepticism and Idealism

ABSTRACT

On one narrative, Berkeleyan idealism arises from Cartesian theorising: Descartes's discussion of dreaming in the Meditations leads first to scepticism, and through scepticism, to Berkeley's rejection of realism. In this paper, I consider how this move from dreams to idealism is supposed to work. I trace this narrative back to Andrew Baxter, one of Berkeley's earliest critics, and reconstruct Baxter's argument that idealism is self‐defeating, a criticism that anticipates some contemporary commentators' analyses. I then turn to Berkeley's text to show that Berkeley's own attitude towards dream scepticism is dismissive at best. This raises the question of how the narrative connecting dreams to idealism took hold; I argue that one place to look may be to Berkeley's perceptual relativity arguments. I suggest that understanding Baxter's criticism helps illuminate both how we should read those arguments, and also, more generally, how we should understand idealism's relationship to scepticism and dreaming.