Berkeley: Philosophy in an Hour

Berkeley

PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR

Paul Strathern

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Berkeley’s Life and Works

Further Information

From Berkeley’s Writings

Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates

Chronology of Berkeley’s Life

      Chronology of Berkeley’s Era

      Recommended Reading

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

Introduction

Berkeley is the sort of philosopher who gives philosophy a bad name. When you first read his work you think it’s ludicrous. And you’re right, it is. Berkeley’s philosophy denies the existence of matter. According to him, there is no material world.

Modern philosophy had been started in the seventeenth century by the French philosopher René Descartes, who maintained that our only true knowledge of the world is based upon reason. Less than half a century later this Cartesianism, as it was called, was opposed by the English philosopher John Locke, who founded empiricism. Locke took a more common sense view, claiming that our only true knowledge of the world must be based upon experience.

It was perhaps inevitable that philosophy wouldn’t remain constricted within the straight-jacket of common sense for long. Just twenty years after Locke’s

Essay on Human Understanding

 came Berkeley’s

Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision

, which set philosophy free from what most of us regard as reality. This carried Locke’s empirical thought through to some very noncommonsensical conclusions. According to Berkeley, if our knowledge is based entirely upon experience, we can only know our own experience. We don’t in fact know the world, just our particular perceptions of it. So what happens to the world when we are not experiencing it? As far as we are concerned, it simply ceases to exist.

So according to Berkeley, when you don’t see something it isn’t there. This position is adopted by infants who screw their eyes closed when they wish to avoid eating any more spinach and prune puree. Yet by the time we have achieved the exalted status when we eat our spinach and prunes separately (or not at all), we have usually grown out of this attitude. But not Berkeley. According to him, a tree isn’t there if we don’t see it or perceive it in any other way, such as touch or smell. So what happens to the tree? Berkeley was a God-fearing man, who eventually became a bishop. This led him to an ingenious explanation as to how the world persists when we don’t experience it. His position is simply explained in the following two limericks:

There was a young man