George Berkeley
George Berkeley \bark'-lee\ (1685-1753) was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of what has come to be called subjective idealism, summed up in his catchphrase, "To be is to be perceived." He wrote a number of works, the most widely-read of which are his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) (Philonous, the "lover of the mind," representing Berkeley himself).
Though born in Ireland, Berkeley was very much an American philosopher. While it was in Ireland that Berkeley had his initial insights into the ideality of the objects of perception, his greatest philosophic insights and the most important projects of his life aimed at applying his principles (including his project to found a utopian society in Bermuda and his medical enterprises) began only with his trip to America.
As a young man, Berkeley demonstrates that the objects we perceive exist precisely as they appear to the senses. Objective knowledge is possible because the perceived object is the only object that exists. There is no "real" object which is the substratum of the perceived
object. There is no physical or material object existing so to speak "behind" the perceived object which "causes" our perceptions.
Since the object we perceive is the only object that exists, the object is precisely as it appears.
It follows that our perceptions of objects are all perfectly accurate and objective, and that any knowledge of the empirical world is to be obtained only through direct perception. Error comes about through thinking. Knowledge of the world of people and things and
actions around us may be perfected merely by stripping away all thought from our perceptions.
The ideal form of scientific knowledge is to be obtained by pursuing pure de-intellectualized perceptions, and if we would pursue these, we would be able to obtain the highest degree of scientific knowledge available to man. The goal of all science, therefore, is to de-intellectualize, and thereby purify, our perceptions.
This is the essence of Berkeley's philosophy. Unfortunately, this doctrine is completely ignored by virtually all scholars today since there is not one who actually approves of his precise philosophical principles as forming a legitimate method of pursuing scientific knowledge.
Yet without a firm grasp of these principles, it is impossible to render an accurate account of Berkeley's ideas or successfully apply them in any scientific enterprise.
Discussion (to be rendered into tighter prose?):
You see a redwood tree. Ha! It's only there while you're looking at it. It was only an image in the mind of God, which the Almighty let you hallucinate on.
In response to the old riddle, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one heard it, did it make a sound?," Berkeley would reply that if no one were there, the tree wouldn't be there.
This is eerily similar to recent theoretical physics notion that mass does not exist.
As Bob Dylan sang about dreams, "It's all in your head."
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