Questions on Berkeley: Abstract Ideas and Existence

1. What are the two forms of abstraction Berkeley explicitly denies? What are his reasons for doing so?

2. How does Berkeley use the distinction between general ideas and abstract general ideas to undermine Locke's idea of a triangle that is "neither oblique nor rectangle [right], equilateral, equicrural nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once"?

3. How is the view [supported by Locke] that words or names represent ideas the source of the mistaken belief in abstract ideas? Instead, how are words like letters used in algebra?

4. "He that knows that names do not always stand for ideas will spare himself the labor of looking for ideas where there are none to be had." How does this apply to Berkeley's rejection of the absolute existence of things apart from their being perceived?

5. In P3 Berkeley says that the table in my room is said to exist even when I am not there to perceive it; how is that possible if its esse is percipi?

6. How does the belief in the existence of unperceived objects depend on the doctrine of abstract ideas?

7. Why can't a sensible thing exist apart from its being perceived by some spirit? And why are only spirits substances?

8. "An idea can be like nothing but an idea": why?

9. Why is the notion of matter or corporeal substance a contradiction? And how does this undermine the primary-secondary quality distinction?

10. How do neither sense nor reason provide evidence for the existence of things outside the mind? And why does supposing their existence only invite skepticism?