Useless Bodies and Divine Wisdom: A New Reading of Berkeley’s Epistemological Argument (PHK 18–20)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Berkeley’s discussion of material substance in §§ 18–20 of the Principles of Human Knowledge . Against the standard view that these sections merely undermine the epistemic justification of material bodies, I argue that Berkeley advances a distinct form of comparative plausibility reasoning. The crucial claim of § 19 is not simply that material causation is unknowable, but that the material hypothesis is rendered explanatorily inferior by considerations of divine economy. Drawing on Berkeley’s commitment to the simplicity of divine action and to the thesis that God can act without intermediary causes, I show that the appeal to useless entities is an independent argumentative step. This reconstruction reveals an overlooked connection between epistemic underdetermination and explanatory parsimony in Berkeley’s immaterialism. More broadly, it sheds new light on Berkeley’s philosophical method by showing that he supplements negative criticism of materialism with a positive criterion for rational theory choice.