George Berkeley

Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop (1685–1753), born near Kilkenny, educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he developed the essentials of his philosophical thought before the age of twenty-eight, and later consecrated Bishop of Cloyne in 1734, a post he held with pastoral dedication during the last two decades of his life, including a period as a frustrated philanthropic missionary in America, where he unsuccessfully attempted to found a college in Bermuda to educate colonists and natives. Berkeley is best known as the founder of immaterialist idealism, the doctrine summed up in his famous Latin maxim esse est percipi ('to be is to be perceived'), according to which material objects have no existence independent of the mind perceiving them, so that what we call 'matter' is nothing but a set of ideas or sensory perceptions organised without any need to posit an unobservable underlying material substance. In his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) and A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley argued that the notion of inert, unthinking matter defended by Locke and other empiricists was an incoherent and unnecessary abstraction, and that the consistency and regularity of the perceived world could only be explained by the existence of an infinite mind —God— who continuously perceives all things and produces in finite minds the ordered ideas we call nature. Far from being a radical scepticism, Berkeley regarded his philosophy as a defence of common sense and, above all, a weapon against the atheism and scientific materialism of his time, since by eliminating matter as an independent substance he also eliminated the metaphysical support for a self-sufficient universe with no need of God. His sharp critique of the excessive abstraction of philosophical language and his pioneering analysis of visual perception in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) exerted a lasting influence on later British empiricism, especially on Hume, and on the philosophy of perception to this day.

8 works

• A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in Our Foreign Plantations, and
• A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher
• An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision
• Passive Obedience, or the Christian Doctrine of Not Resisting the Supreme Power
• The Querist
• The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 Philosophical Works, 1705-21
• Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheis