Comrades:

John Locke

Look, I know I've been hard on John. I gave him grief for his conception of physical substance, his distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and for his notion of abstraction. But that's only because I know he can take the heat.

Underneath all of those criticisms, though, I have the deepest respect for Locke. After all, he started the tradition of empiricism, the view that all knowledge is based on experience, on observation and experiment. And that is my starting point, too. I may not always come to the same conclusions as Locke, but I realize that without him, there would be no me, and that would be a great loss to humanity.

David Hume

Hume, along with Locke, is the other member of the British Empiricist club. Notice that whenever someone mentions one of us, that person has to mention the other two as well. Actually, we're kind of like the Three Musketeers, when you think about it. Except we're not French. Or swordsmen. And we don't exactly have that "all for one, one for all" thing going. But you get the point. Three peas in a pod—that's us.

Asaṅga

I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that I've ever read any of Asaṅga's writing; it's not as if this sort of thing was available to me. Asaṅga was a 4th-century Buddhist monk living in India who founded the Yogācāra School of Mahāyāna Buddhism. But the key tenet of this belief system is the Berkeley-esque claim that mind is primary—that all phenomena are only manifestations of mind. I would swear that Asaṅga stole this idea from me, except for the little detail that he was around 1000 years before I was.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Okay, so we're not total mains. He got these wacky "transcendental" ideas from Kant, and he thinks that the "I" alone is responsible for the structure of reality. Where's God in this picture, buddy? Still, he does hold that the phenomenal world emerges out of self-consciousness, and that's just a fancy way of expressing my point that everything, ultimately, is mind.

Rivals:

Isaac Newton

Just because they put a "Sir" in front of your name doesn't mean you can't make mistakes. Isaac sure made lots of them, starting with his Theory of Universal Gravitation.

No, I'm not denying that Newton's theory gives us an accurate way of describing the movement of the planets, the behavior of falling bodies, and so forth. What I point out is that we can never actually observe the supposed underlying gravitational force itself. Appealing to made-up unobservables in this way doesn't actually explain anything, even if it does allow us to make successful predictions.

I also take Isaac to task for his conceptions of "absolute" motion and "absolute" space. All motion, I show, must be understood as only relative. With this idea, I anticipate the views of Ernst Mach and even Albert Einstein. Likewise, I show that the notion of "absolute space" simply makes no sense.

Take that, Mr. Sir Isaac Newton.

Edmond Halley

Ever heard of Halley's Comet? That was named after this astronomer. Makes him sound pretty legit, right? Well, in my work The Analyst, I took this "infidel mathematician" to task. (And please don't get all bent out of shape about the phrase "infidel mathematician." I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though I'll admit that I didn't like it when Halley convinced a friend of mine that Christianity was a myth.)

My argument was that the foundational notions of calculus are as mysterious and unknowable as any of the principles of Christianity. So why is religion dismissed as irrational superstition, while mathematics is supposed to be the highest expression of reason?

Of course, my criticism here was not directed against Halley alone. No, I had far bigger fish to fry—ultimately, the very creators of calculus. Leibniz and Newton, are you listening?

René Descartes

Everyone has to have some criticism of old René. It's kind of a rite of passage for any up-and-coming philosopher these days. Well, I performed my service at least two times over.

One important problem I found in Descartes's Meditations is the way he equates the mind with its thoughts. Most people seem to think I hold a Cartesian view of the mind, so it's very important to note that, in fact, I believe you have to sharply distinguish the mind itself from its mental contents (source).

I also took issue with Descartes's theory of vision—in particular his theory of the perception of distance.

W.V. Quine

Well, I mention Quine as my rival, but I could equally include the vast majority of philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries working in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Nearly all of them are avowed "physicalists," i.e., materialists of one stripe or another who completely reject my view of subjective idealism and who believe that everything is physical or material (and not spiritual or mental). Sometimes, it seems as if the whole modern world is my philosophical opponent.

I single out Quine for three reasons. The first is that I like his name (he should have been one of those single-named rock stars). Second, Quine makes a big deal about the (supposed) fact that he and everything else in the world are completely physical (source). And, third, Quine, like me, recognizes that we cannot talk about the world as existing completely independently of the way we conceive of it. It's ironic, then, that this standpoint leads him to propose physicalism, while for me it is the pathway to idealism.