George Berkeley

GEORGE BERKELEY

August 11, 2017

BERKELEY’S IMMATERIALISM (PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS)

       “If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever”. That is only one of his famous quotes, it means that even if the strangest or craziest thing or belief  that we’ve agreed to this world, basically you  admit that there is some strange or unusual things that is happening to this world. George Berkely defends two metaphysical theses: “Idealism and Immaterialism”. Immaterialism is the only way to secure common sense, science, and religion against the perils of skepticism.

      

      George Berkley was one of the three most famous British Empiricists. (The other two are John Locke and David Hume.)  Berkeley is best known for his early works on vision (An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, 1709) and metaphysics (A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713). George Berkeley ( 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753) — known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne) — was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). The diocese of Cloyne has its origins in the monastic settlement founded by St Colman in the 6th century. Cloyne was not one of the dioceses established at the Synod of Rathbreasail in 1111, but a bishop of Cloyne was ruling the diocese by 1148, which was recognised at the Synod of Kells in March 1152. Berkeley’s empirical theory of vision challenged the then-standard account of distance vision, an account which requires tacit geometrical calculations.

      Berkely’s philosophical view is often described as an argument for "immaterialism", by which is meant a denial of the existence of matter (or more precisely, material substance.) But he also, famously, argued in support of three further theses. He argued for idealism, the thesis that mind constitutes the ultimate reality. He argued that the existence of things consists in their being perceived. And he argued that the mind which is the substance of the world is a single infinite mind – in short, God. These are four different theses, but they are intimately connected in Berkeley's presentation of them, the arguments for the first three sharing most of their premisses and steps. My chief purpose in what follows is to give an account of these arguments, their interactions, and the assumptions and methods underlying them. Doing so makes their strengths and weaknesses both conspicuous and perspicuous.

     Berkeley's philosophical aim in arguing for these theses is to refute two kinds of scepticism. One is epistemological scepticism, which says that we cannot know the true nature of things because (familiarly) certain perceptual relativities and psychological contingencies oblige us to distinguish appearance from reality in such a way that knowledge of the latter is at least problematic and at worst impossible. The other is theological scepticism, which Berkeley calls "atheism" and which in his view includes not only views that deny the existence of a deity outright, but also Deism, for which the universe subsists without a deity's continual creative activity. In opposing the first scepticism Berkeley took himself to be defending common sense and eradicating "causes of error and difficulty in the sciences." In opposing the second he took himself to be defending religion.

     The attack on theological scepticism is effected on a metaphysical rather than doctrinal level in P and D. Doctrinal questions receive more attention in such later writings as Alciphron. But in one important respect Berkeley saw his views as a fundamental contribution to natural theology, in that he thought they constitute a powerful new proof of the existence of a God.

     As the self-proclaimed defender of common sense, Berkeley held that what we perceive really is as we perceive it to be. But what we perceive are just sensible objects, collections of sensible qualities, which are themselves nothing other than ideas in the minds of their perceivers. In the Dialogues Berkeley used Lockean arguments about the unreliability of secondary qualities in support of his own, more radical view.

     Take heat, for example: does it exist independently of our perception of it? When exposed to great heat I feel a pain that everyone acknowledges to be in me, not in the fire, Berkeley argued, so the warmth I feel when exposed to lesser heat must surely be the same. What is more, if dip both of my hands into a bowl of tepid water after chilling one and warming the other, the water will feel both warm and cold at the same time. Clearly, then, heat as I perceive it is nothing other than an idea in my mind..Similar arguments and experiments establish that other sensible qualities—colors that vary with changes in ambient light, tastes and smells that change perceptibly when I have a cold, and sounds that depend for their quality on the position of my ears and conditions in the air—are, like heat, nothing but ideas in my mind. But the same considerations apply to primary qualities as well, Berkeley pointed out, since my perception of shape and size depend upon the position of my eyes, my experience of solidity depends upon my sense of touch, and my idea of motion is always relative to my own situation. Locke was correct in his view of secondary qualities but mistaken about primary qualities: all sensible qualities are just ideas.

     In conclusion, the world consists of nothing but minds and ideas. Ordinary objects are collections of ideas. We argued that one learns to coordinate ideas of sight and touch to judge distance, magnitude, and figure, properties which are immediately perceived only by touch. The ideas of one sense become signs of ideas of the other senses. This coordination of regularly occurring ideas becomes the way the world is known and the way humans construct real things. If there are only minds and ideas, there is no place for some scientific constructs.