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CATCHING BERKELEY'S SHADOW
Author(s) -
STONEHAM TOM
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the southern journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.281
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 2041-6962
pISSN - 0038-4283
DOI - 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00049.x
Subject(s) - shadow (psychology) , sight , virtue , orientation (vector space) , counterexample , philosophy , aesthetics , art history , art , epistemology , physics , mathematics , psychology , optics , geometry , combinatorics , psychotherapist
Berkeley thinks that we only see the size, shape, location, and orientation of objects in virtue of the correlation between sight and touch. Shadows have all of these spatial properties and yet are intangible. In Seeing Dark Things (2008), Roy Sorensen argues that shadows provide a counterexample to Berkeley's theory of vision and, consequently, to his idealism. This paper shows that Berkeley can accept both that shadows are intangible and that they have spatial properties.