When1: 1709
When2: 1744
Who: George Berkeley [Berkeley, George]
What: philosopher
Where: England
works\ Essay towards a New Theory of Vision [1709]; Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge [1710 and 1713]; Passive Obedience [1712]; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous [1713]; On Motion [1721]; Minute Philosopher [1732]; Siris or Chain of Philosophical Reflections, and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water [1744]
Detail: He lived 1685 to 1753, was Catholic, and studied vision psychology.
Epistemology
Mind can only know sense impressions and images {immediate object}, perception contents. Mind only knows primary qualities and secondary qualities. People cannot know anything about physical world or about substance. Objects are only quality conjunctions, with no need for substance.
Mind only uses examples and analogies, not words or abstractions. Abstractions are illusions, because they just recombine words. Abstractions about object sensations are not real in thought or nature, because they must both include and exclude qualities, and no process can be so general and so specific simultaneously.
Perception cause is God's will, which maintains complex correlations between all sense qualities. All people thus perceive the same unified, continuous, and coherent world, and world really is as it appears.
People correlate visual experience and visual judgments, such as distance and size, by contingent and arbitrary associations, not by calculation. Objects in visual experience are only mental {divine visual language}, by which people infer information about environment objects. People do not know or use innate mathematical ideas or optics theorems.
Mechanical movements do not cause or explain anything, but scientific theories are useful to predict experience.
Metaphysics
Matter is not real. Only mind and sense qualities are real {subjective idealism}. To exist is to be perceived {esse est percipi}.
If consciousness is matter property, world needs no creator, and soul is mortal.
The real world is under will of God and is purposeful. God perceives, and thus guarantees, material existence.
Mind
Mind is not ideas but contains or perceives ideas. Perceiving or attending is mental action, and mind is mental actions. People are, and are only, minds or spirits, thinking things. Only intelligent active animate agents or minds can have will and cause ideas or events. People are always thinking and do not have unconscious periods {doctrine of private times} {private times doctrine}.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224