Professor Bart Streumer | University of Groningen
Bart Streumer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He previously taught at the University of Reading in the UK, and before that was a research fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK. His main research interest is metaethics, but he is also interested in other areas of philosophy.
Date | 5 November 2025
Title | 'How Berkeley Can Go Quasi and Lose His Mind-Dependence'
Abstract:
Berkeley defends idealism partly by taking ordinary objects such as tables and stones to consist of ideas. Materialists reject this account of ordinary objects. I argue that Berkeley can undermine this rejection by making quasi-realist moves of the kind that many expressivists about normativity make.
This ultimately results in a version of idealism that we cannot believe, since trying to believe it will make us believe materialism. But I argue that this version of idealism may nevertheless be true.