What is the relationship between philosophical and vulgar ideas in the writings of Berkeley and Hume?.
For as long as philosophy has existed, the paradigms of the intellectual thinkers and the common men have come into conflict. Philosophers have often been accused of living in ivory towers, positing theories, which, while they may seem semantically and/or logically possible, seem a wholly unpractical way for anyone to regard life when they are living, as Hume says "away from their desk." Both George Berkeley and David Hume recognized the chasms between the worldview of these two classes, and both attempted to decipher with which group the truth lay. Berkeley and Hume were both empiricists, yet it would be false to assume that because their metaphysics were similar, they shared all their other views as well. In fact, each of these philosophers had their own, very distinct notion of the relationship between philosophical and vulgar ideas.
Berkeley, as I will show here, believed that we arrived at true ideas when we combined the philosophical and vulgar. In his book, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Berkeley makes it very clear that he regards his own position to be that of the everyday man on the street. In his introduction to the Dialogues, Berkeley identifies himself as something of a rebel philosopher, one who has distained the prejudices of his peers against common sense, and who finds, at the end of his enquiries, that the simple assumptions of the farmer, are, as far as they go, correct. From page six of the introduction, Berkeley is defending the vulgar ideas of men, and even including his own philosophy in that category. He says that the reason that he has written the Dialogues in such an informal manner is 'especially because these ideas carry with them a great opposition to the prejudices of philosophers which have so far prevailed against the common sense and natural notions of mankind.
