Articles

Complementarity & Reality

Alistair MacFarlane has complementary ways of looking at things.

In Boswell’s biography we are told how Dr Johnson, a naïve Realist, sought to refute the Idealist Bishop Berkeley’s claim that everything exists in the mind. He did so by kicking a stone, exclaiming: “I refute it thus!” But there are more enlightened things to do with stones than kick them. Suitably large, flat stones can be used as tables or seats. A smaller, lighter stone could be used to hold a door open or shut, and we would then call it a doorstop. If it seemed to us to have a pleasing shape and an attractive surface we might adopt it as an ornament.

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