In defense of phenomenalism: Why Berkeley is not all wrong

A phenomenalist argument begins with the premise that sense-experience provides us with our point of contact with the world, and ends with the conclusion that the world is constituted out of our experiences of it. I systematically reconstruct the phenomenalist argument as it is formulated by George Berkeley, with the aim of determining whether that argument is defensible.;In the process, I take positions on some important issues in the literature. I re-envision the role of perceptual relativity arguments for Berkeley, arguing that they are central in establishing both the conclusion that we immediately perceive ideas and the likeness principle. I consider Berkeley's attack on abstraction, arguing that it is grounded in his reliance on a direct perception theory and the principle that impossibility implies inconceivability. I argue that Berkeley denies that there is a real distinction between acts of perception and ideas, but that this is consistent with his upholding such common-sense notions as the persistence of objects over time. And I offer a new reading of the role of God for Berkeley, on which divine perception of ideas is tantamount to causation of those ideas.;In the first part of the dissertation, I consider Berkeley's positive case for phenomenalism. I reconstruct Berkeley's argument that we immediately perceive ideas; I consider his contention that ideas are mind-dependent, which I take to be a separate step in the argument; finally, I evaluate his claim that one can plausibly construct physical objects out of ideas. In the final chapters, I focus on Berkeley's denial that any relation can hold between ideas and mind-independent objects. I reconstruct Berkeley's argument for the likeness principle, that ideas can only be like other ideas, which leads him to rule out indirect realism; I also consider Berkeley's arguments that ideas cannot inhere in or be caused by mind-independent objects, which lead him to conclude that realism has no explanatory value. In an appendix, I suggest that Berkeley's argument that the term 'matter' is meaningless mirrors the structure of his argument for phenomenalism.