George Berkeley

1685-1753 · Anglo-Irish · Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Perception, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Religion

We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

A brilliant young fellow at Trinity College Dublin announced, before he was twenty-five, that matter does not exist. George Berkeley meant it literally — and spent his life arguing that this was not madness but common sense rescued from the philosophers. Born to an Anglo-Irish family in Kilkenny, he wrote his three great works in a burst of youthful confidence, then chased a doomed dream: a college in Bermuda to educate the New World, for which he sailed to Rhode Island in 1728 and waited three years for funds that never arrived. He returned to become Bishop of Cloyne, and grew old extolling…

Topics George Berkeley addresses

• immaterialism
• esse est percipi
• ideas as the immediate objects of perception
• sensible things as collections of ideas
• spirit as active substance
• the likeness principle
• the rejection of abstract ideas
• the Master Argument
• the collapse of primary and secondary qualities
• God as the cause of ideas
• divine continuous perception
• mind known by notion not by idea
• the ontological dualism of spirit and idea
• esse est percipere
• the language of nature
• the heterogeneity of sight and touch
• the Molyneux problem
• the unperceived perceivable subsisting in the mind of God
• the alleged Berkeleian circle
• the ghosts of departed quantities
• the critique of fluxions and the calculus
• instrumentalist philosophy of physics
• the late Platonic synthesis
• tar-water and the chain of being

Converse with George Berkeley on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in George Berkeley's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.