The World must be Measured by Eye — Dreams and Madness in the Philosophies of Mary Shepherd

Every night humans turn down the lights and fall asleep into a world like nothing anyone’s seen before. What is that world? How is it similar to the usual world we navigate? And if dreaming feels the same as being awake, how can we know we’re not imagining the waking world? In philosophy, questions of what exists and how we can know about it are part of branches called metaphysics and epistemology, respectively. Mary Shepherd is an early modern metaphysician and epistemologist who engaged directly with these questions in her 1827 volume Essays on the Perception of an External Universe. Specifically, in the fourth chapter, Shepherd addresses how dreaming, though a nearly universal experience, presents a potential problem in the study of epistemology. If a dreamer can experience thoughts, images, and sensations while they are separated from the waking world, who’s to say the external universe exists at all? And if we can experience something like the external universe while we are separated from it, is the external universe necessary to perception? Could each of our experiences be a form of dreaming? These questions cast the most fundamental aspects of human experience into murky territory. This project examines Shepherd’s theory of dreams, considering it within its historical and philosophical context, including how it served as a response to the theories of David Hume, George Berkeley, and Thomas Reid. It argues that Shepherd’s account provides a remarkably novel framework through which we might know the world.

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