Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that the two philosophers held fundamentally different pictures of reality and its laws and, pari passu, human beings and their place in the world. It focuses on George Berkeley, and aims to make what Stoneham characterizes as ‘a move in that enticing game of guessing the contents of the Principles of Human Knowledge Part 2’. The book discusses how seventeenth-century concerns sympathy intertwine with concerns about explanation, including those of human action. It explores the ways in which the moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel are dependent upon their underlying conceptions of action. The book examines R. G. Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why it is that the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure.