1. He was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin (1700-1707).
2. His major works were all written during his twenties: An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Knowledge (1710), and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus (1713).
3. He became the Anglican bishop of Cloyne in 1734.
4. He engaged in several humanitarian projects.
a. With promised subscriptions from prominent persons and
promised help from Parliament, he planned the establishment of a college in
Bermuda to train colonists, Indians, and blacks for the ministry.
1) In 1728, he traveled to Rhode Island to establish farms to
provide food for the college.
2) The money for the project not forthcoming, he gave up on
it and returned to England in 1731.
b. As bishop of a poor, remote diocese, he advocated public
works and education to aid the poor.
c. He also became an advocate of the medicinal virtues of
tar-water.
5. His denial of the existence of material objects led to an interesting and amusing reply from Samuel Johnson. According to James Boswell, after he pointed out that Berkeley’s position was not true but also was impossible to refute, "I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute him thus!’"
1. Although his arguments in favor of idealism are seldom accepted, he developed many of Locke’s ideas with a greater consistency in a way that has produced one of the great challenges for modern philosophy: If our ideas ultimately originate in sense experience and this is mental experience, what assurance do we have that material objects exist?
2. "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived") is a famous, and challenging phrase in philosophy.
3. If, turning away from Berkeley, one takes away God’s existence while retaining his claims about our reality consisting of ideas in our own minds, one arrives at probably the strongest argument for solipsism.
4. His analysis of the meaning of abstract ideas offers a model for later linguistic analysis.
5. By arguing for idealism over materialism, he is able to make a case for God’s existence and to counter the prevailing influence of science on philosophical thinking.
a. Since all these advances in science dealt with the physical world, he provided an alternative, based on sensory experience, that did not lead to scientific materialism.
a. Although we have separate abstract ideas of extension,
color, and motion, singular qualities themselves do not exist separately but are
always mixed with other singular qualities.
b. By considering what is common to a number of particulars,
the mind is able to form an abstract idea of extension that is neither a line,
nor surface, nor solid, nor has any figure or magnitude. Likewise, for the
abstract idea of a man. But "the idea of man that I frame to myself must be
either of a white or a black or a tawny, a straight or a crooked, a tall or a
short or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought, conceive the
abstract idea" of a man.
c. While general words suggest abstract general ideas, these
general words are merely indicators that the words refer to particular ideas
indifferently. That is to say, when we use the general term "man" we are
referring to the idea of particular men; but we are indifferent as to which
particular man the general term is referring to.
d. When we look into our own thoughts, we find that we have
ideas of oblique, right-angled, equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles;
but we never have a general idea of a triangle.
e. Even when we provide a demonstration, we use, for example,
a particular triangle to show that all other particular triangles can be treated
the same way.
f. Language is the source of the misinterpretation of
abstract ideas because (1) language suggests that every name has a single,
precise reference and (2) it is believed that language serves no other purpose
but the communication of ideas and each "significant name stands for an idea."
1) In addition to descriptive communication, language can
arouse emotions or can persuade.
a. The ideas that are objects of human knowledge must be ones
actually imprinted on the senses, ones perceived through the passions and
operations of the mind, or ones formed through memory or imagination.
b. Given the ideas, there must be something that knows,
perceives, or operates on them—namely, the "mind, spirit, soul, or myself."
c. Esse est percipi: To be is to be perceived.
d. It is perfectly unintelligible to assert "the absolute
existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived."
The view that sensible objects such as houses, mountains, and rivers have an
existence distinct from their being perceived by the understanding is "an
opinion strangely prevailing among men."
e. The belief in the separate existence of material things
"perhaps" depends upon the misleading nature of abstract ideas.
f. Ideas cannot be thought to be copies or resemblances of
things existing outside the ideas, because an idea "can be like nothing but an
idea."
a. Ideas in themselves are passive or inert; so they cannot
produce themselves, change themselves, or totally disappear; hence they do not
cause anything themselves.
b. Hence there must be a spiritual substance or agent that
produces and sustains them.
c. This spirit is not itself directly perceived but rather is
inferred from its effects, that is, the ideas.
d. "A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being; as it
perceives ideas it is called the understanding, and as it produces or
otherwise operates about them it is called the will."
a. Generally, by denying the reality of materialistic
entities (which seem most firmly grounded in reality for most people), Berkeley
lays the groundwork for the existence of spiritual entities, including the soul
and God.
b. "all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the
world, do not have any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be
perceived or known, that consequently, so long as they are not actually
perceived by me or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit,
they must either have no existence at all or else subsist in the mind of some
eternal spirit—it being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the absurdity
of abstraction to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent
of a spirit." (So the only assurance that something exists when we are not
perceiving it, for example, the sound of a tree falling in the forest when no
one else is around, or even the tree itself, is God’s existence.—RY)
1) Note that Berkeley is not denying that chairs exist, he is
asserting instead that they exist only as ideas in a mind.
c. Proof of God’s Existence
1) Ideas are passive;
2) Spirit is the necessary active agent for the production of
ideas;
3) Ideas perceived by the senses (including the laws of
nature) are not due to my will, that is, are not due to my being an active
agent;
4) Therefore, there must be a superior Will, namely, God that
produces these ideas.
1. Although Berkeley denies the existence of material entities, he effectively reproduces the whole world of material entities as material-type ideas—material-type ideas that will be studied and applied in all the ordinary ways we go about learning about the natural world and applying our knowledge. So one may question whether he has really gained much—although, from Berkeley’s point of view, the substitution of idealism for materialism, establishes a sounder foundation for claims about God’s existence as a spiritual entity outside the material world.
2. Berkeley’s strikes me as committing a common fallacy that I will call "The X Fallacy": Because I am aware of, or experience, everything through X, it follows that there is nothing but X.
a. Some candidates for X: X = ideas (Berkeley); X = mind (Berkeley); X = my mind (solipsists); X = sense impressions (Hume); X = my personal judgment (subjectivists); X = language (Wittgenstein – "The limits of my language are limits of my world"); X = social constructs (social constructivists).
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Last updated 4/27/04
© Copyright 2004 by Ron Yezzi