George Berkeley

1. George Berkeley By: Alicia Ramirez

2. George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1685 at his family home in Dysart Castle, Ireland. • He was the eldest son of William Berkeley, a cadet of the noble family of Berkeley. • He went to Kilkenny College and later attended Trinity College, Dublin, and completed a Master’s degree in 1707 as a tutor and Greek lecturer. • He was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose major accomplishment was the expansion of a theory called “immaterialism” Background Information

3. Immaterialism asserts that individuals can only know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as “matter”, and that ideas depend on perceiving minds for their very existence. • This idea of immaterialism was expressed by his saying “esseestpercipi” (“to be is to be perceived”). • According to the “esseestpercipi” thesis, all the things surrounding us are nothing but our ideas. Sensible things have no other existence distinct from their being perceived by us. • This also applies to human bodies. When we see our bodies or move our limbs, we perceive only certain sensations in our consciousness. Immaterialism

4. When identifying the sensuously perceived world with ideas of the knowing subject, Berkeley did not maintain that ideas exhausted the content of reality. There is perceiving, active being, or mental substance (mind, spirit, soul), in which ideas exist. • According to Berkeley there are only two kinds of things: spirits and ideas. Spirits are simple, active beings which produce and perceive ideas; ideas are passive beings which are produced and perceived. • Berkeley introduced the word “notion” to account for discourse about spiritual substance and its operations. For Berkeley, we have no idea of spirits yet we have a “notion” of them. Spirits and Ideas

5. Berkeley was an idealist He held that ordinary objects are only collections of ideas, which are mind-dependent. • A convinced adherent of religion, Berkeley believed God to be present as an immediate cause all our experiences. • Berkeley’s mystic idealism claimed that nothing separated man and God (except materialist misconceptions, of course), since nature or matter did not exist as a reality independent of consciousness. • The revelation of God was directly accessible to man, according to this doctrine; it was the sense-perceived world, the world of man’s sensations, which came to him from on high for him to decipher and so grasp the divine purpose. • God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university quadrangle. Rather, my perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in mine, and the tree continues to exist in the quadrangle when "nobody" is there, simply because God is an infinite mind that perceives all. Idealism

6. Berkeley stated that individuals cannot think or talk about an object's being, but rather think or talk about an object's being perceived by someone. That is, individuals cannot know any "real" object or matter "behind" the object as they perceive it, which "causes" their perceptions. He thus concluded that all that individuals know about an object is their perception of it. • Allegedly under his theory, the object a person perceives is the only object that the person knows and experiences. If individuals need to speak at all of the "real" or "material" object it is this perceived object to which all such names should exclusively refer. • Berkeley argued that since an individual experiences other humans in the way they speak to him—something that is not originating from his own activity—and since he learns that their view of the world is consistent with his, he can believe in their existence and in the world being identical or similar for everyone. • Any knowledge of the world is to be obtained only through direct perception. • Error comes about through thinking about what individuals perceive. • Knowledge of the world of people, things and actions around them may be purified and perfected merely by stripping away all thought, and with it language, from their pure perceptions. Theoretical Principles

7. “The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.” • “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” • “You can never plan the future by the past.” • “If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.” Quotes

8. http://www.iep.utm.edu/wp-content/media/berkeley1.jpg • http://www.philosophyparadise.com/quotes/berkeley.html • http://www.iep.utm.edu/berkeley/ Works Cited