The View from Everywhere

Published: 16 May 2025

My wife’s book, The View from Everywhere, is now officially available!

OUP online | print | Amazon | Theme song

I’d say it’s a must-read for two (admittedly rather niche) audiences:

• Anyone specifically interested in Berkeleyan idealism (and related views).¹

• Anyone generally interested in ambitious metaphysics, or curious to read analytic philosophy addressing “Big Questions” (rather than the usual semantic quibbles about whether tacos qualify as a kind of sandwich).

In this post, I’ll share a few highlights.

The Big Questions

Two of the biggest questions in (non-normative) philosophy are:

(1) What is the fundamental nature of reality?

(2) What is the relation between mind and matter?

This book does not, of course, decisively settle those questions. (Anyone who claimed to have done so would be a charlatan.) But it systematically develops a novel candidate answer—a radically new, yet coherent and well-developed, picture of fundamental reality—that is fascinating to think about, and plausibly warrants non-trivial credence.

Chances are, you don’t currently assign any non-trivial credence to the view that mind is more fundamental than matter. Or, even if you do, you probably don’t have any clear sense of how to coherently fit this view together with (i) familiar sensory phenomena like illusions, hallucinations, and afterimages; (ii) laws of nature, microphysics, and the deliverances of modern science more generally; (iii) the distinctness of our brains and our minds, and the obvious priority of the former (since neural functioning clearly gives rise to our conscious experiences).

The View from Everywhere develops a coherent view that makes sense of all of this (and more). That doesn’t guarantee that it’s true—there are many ways the world could be, and this book mere seeks to map out one branch of the tree of possibilities. But the structure it describes is a live possibility—a candidate for being the structure of our world—and worth considering for both intrinsic and instrumental (to understanding other philosophical topics) reasons. It’s an exemplar of analytic metaphysics at its best.

Indirect Lessons

For all its virtues, I personally remain broadly unconvinced of idealism.² What I like best about the book are its indirect lessons: the things we learn from thinking about idealism that don’t depend on the view turning out to be true. Two examples:

Lesson #1: The apparent plausibility of reductive physicalism (about consciousness) depends on our treating matter as a “black box” of unknown and mysterious power. Compare: on idealism, we can more fully grasp the nature of physical brains: they are constituted by suitably-related qualia of grey squishiness and such (that is, every other possible veridical perception of the brain). But it would be transparently absurd to propose reducing pain to a brain state like C-fibers-firing on that understanding of what the brain amounts to. (The feeling of pain is plainly distinct from that of grey squishiness and such.) But a qualia-qualia reduction ought to be the best case scenario for reductionists! Supposing instead that brains are fundamentally material makes the problem less intuitively transparent, but all the worse in principle.

As Helen explains in section 3.2.4:

The reductive materialist maintains that experiences emerge from wholly non-experiential material building-blocks, appropriately arranged. Such brute emergence, Strawson argues, is no more intelligible than space emerging from non-spatial building blocks (arranged via non-spatial relations)… By contrast, idealist reductionism about the mind doesn’t try to wring experientiality from non-experiential building-blocks. The building-blocks themselves are thoroughly experiential. We can now wrap our minds around the nature of the building-blocks. This might seem to alleviate Strawson’s brute emergence worries. But instead of rendering the emergence of our phenomenology more intelligible, it makes the unintelligibility of reductionism all the clearer.

If C-fibers are fundamentally phenomenal, their nature is graspable by us. But far from rendering it intelligible how pain could reduce to CFF, it seems manifestly incoherent that my experience of pain be reduced to the bundle of sensory experiences that constitute this brain state. If idealism is true, we can literally wrap our minds around the nature of our brain states. And when we do so, all we find are sensory impressions (e.g. of the visual experiences of brain activity seen through an fMRI or neurons seen through a microscope) that clearly don’t amount to the hurtiness of pain.

Lesson #2: Perceptual “direct realism” can be cashed out as meaningfully distinct from representationalism—but only given an idealist account of physical reality.

The picture of perception developed in Chapter 4 is totally wild: rather than generating new personal phenomenology that in some way “resembles” perceived external objects, in the event of veridical perception our minds reach out to literally encompass perceived surfaces of the external world. Since those external surfaces are themselves just bits of phenomenology, they’re eligible to literally enter into our minds (when suitably connected). You can thus be acquainted with perceptible external surfaces in just the same, direct way that you’re acquainted with your own pains.

Compared to the full-blown direct acquaintance offered by this “naive idealism”, the “direct acquaintance” relation posited by materialist “naive realists” is exposed as a cheap knock-off. One can, of course, talk of being “acquainted” with whatever is at the end of a suitable causal chain in the event of perception. But if the object isn’t the sort of thing that can literally enter your mind, it’s hard to see much substance behind the talk, or any non-verbal difference from the representationalist picture (on which our minds contain representations of perceived objects, not the objects themselves).

Things that might surprise you

My sense is that older philosophers, at least, may have a bit of a stereotyped conception of what a book on idealism must look like. They seem to imagine something like:

• Implausible ambitions to try to show that rival materialist views are inconceivable (perhaps paired with hopelessly fallacious arguments involving unconceived trees).

• Scholastic metaphysical orientation: formal, theistic, impenetrably abstract, etc.

• An insular approach, offering little engagement with contemporary science or other areas of philosophy.

• Stodgy prose, and no theme song.

The View from Everywhere is, thankfully, the opposite of this in every respect. It’s a wide-ranging and thoroughly playful work of philosophy. (I should probably flag that the theme song isn’t Helen’s fault. But my accompanying post includes some favorite quotes from her book—passages about “silly hat parties”, “death, taxes, and the veil of perception”, etc.)

A Table-Turning Dialogue

There’s a fun dialogue in chapter 6 that aims to help the reader see the debate in a new light:

Sometimes it’s difficult to take a truly neutral starting point. Another way we could approach the merits of idealism, compared to materialism, is to turn the tables. Imagine that we all grow up indoctrinated with an idealist world-view. Young philosophers grow up reading The View from Everywhere, finding it as natural as you might the materialism of Lewis and Armstrong.

Ida is a young implicit idealist. She goes off to grad school, where she encounters materialism for the first time. Her initial encounter with Matt, the materialist, might go something like this:

Ida: So if the world isn’t made of experiences, then what is it made of?

Matt: It’s made of atoms.

Ida: Of course it is; I agree. But what are atoms on your view?

Matt: Oh, I don’t know. But they’re not experiences!

. . .

Ida: So. . . you don’t think that snow is cold? Or that tomatoes are red?

Matt: Well, I mean, we can truthfully say that tomatoes are red. But that’s just because they have a molecular structure that causes certain wavelengths of light to be reflected from them, and this affects our brains in a certain way.

Ida: Yeah, but according to you tomatoes aren’t really red. Redness is all in our imaginations...

. . .

Ida: You’re telling me that your theory is that tomatoes are not-red things made out of not-experiences?! How is that a compelling alternative to idealism?!

Matt: Well, it’s much simpler. We don’t need to have all those experience that you say make everything up.

Ida: Yeah, but it’s simpler because you got rid of the world! Tomatoes aren’t red, fire isn’t hot, violins don’t make sounds. And the alternative picture is that it’s all made up out of what? Not-experiences?! What the heck are those?

Matt: Well. . .

Ida can be forgiven for finding Matt’s alternative worldview uncompelling. There are costs to embracing materialism…

Given a materialist starting point, idealism looks strange. Given an idealist starting point, materialism looks even more baffling. And given a neutral starting point, perhaps there are virtues to both.

Better than Berkeley

One of my quirkier meta-philosophical views is that I’m a strong believer in intellectual progress: new stuff is being written all the time that’s better—more worth reading—than past work on the topic.

In that vein, allow me to stake out the strong view that The View from Everywhere is the best book that’s ever been written on idealism. Anyone wanting to understand the view, and the best case for it, will learn vastly more from this book than from any other source they might turn to. (In particular, I think it would be a serious mistake for anyone to read or assign Berkeley now as their entry point to the debate.)³

The View from Everywhere would also be a great pick for anyone teaching a metaphysics graduate seminar next semester. I’m sure that the eventual reviews by other philosophers—not married to the author—will back up my claim that this is a top-tier work of analytic metaphysics: combining extraordinary philosophical ambition and creativity, careful reasoning, and clear, readable prose. If you’ve never read David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds, I might suggest that you remedy that oversight first. But there aren’t many other works that exemplify these particular philosophical virtues so well.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:⁴ check out the sample chapter and see for yourself whether it piques your interest enough to read on.⁵ As the Preface concludes:

Like its namesake,

this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us hope of coming up with any candidates for truth. (Nagel 1986, 10)

Of course, as Nagel tells us, this “is not the same as coming up with the truth”. Perhaps our world does not number among the idealist worlds. I will be content if you agree that idealism should be taken seriously as a viable candidate for truth. Few are antecedently inclined to grant any nonnegligible credence to idealism; I hope this book will change that.

1. You might think that this group, in particular, must be tiny. If you limit your attention to academic philosophy then it is. But there’s a surprising amount of interest in idealism from non-academic audiences. (Pop-philosopher Bernardo Kastrup seems to have quite an internet following, for example.)

2. The book’s dedication page laments my “irrationally low” credence in idealism. (Though I’ve argued that it’s at least more credible than deontology!)

3. Unless you’re specifically interested in the history, of course. There can be certain contexts in which “the first defense of a view” > “the best defense of a view”. But I think they’re rare, and people too often default to “the first” over “the best”.

4. You totally should, though.

On my old blog, I once recommended a paper of Helen’s with the prediction that it would likely be the best philosopher paper you’d read all year. Helen later told me of a philosopher who mentioned seeing this and thinking to themselves, “Yeah, yeah, of course her husband would say that.” But after reading the paper, they had to admit that I’d been right after all. :-)

5. One proviso: you may need to be at least moderately tolerant of typos. Helen is dyslexic, and OUP’s copyeditors didn’t catch them all.