por Who was George Berkeley?
George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish bishop, philosopher, and scientist, best known for his empiricist, idealistic philosophy, and as one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern period. He developed a philosophy known as subjective idealism or immaterialism.
Furthermore, he was known as one of the most brilliant critics of his predecessors; especially Descartes, Malebranche and Locke. He was a metaphysician famous for defending idealism: that is, everything (except the spiritual) exists to the extent that it can be perceived by the senses.
His most studied works, the Treatise on the principles of human knowledge and the Essay of the new theory of visionas well as De Motu and siris, they constituted dense writings with arguments that delighted their contemporaries at the time philosophers.
On the other hand, he aroused great interest in various topics such as religion, the psychology of vision, mathematics, medicine, morality, economics, and physics.
Although his first readers failed to fully understand his works, years later he influenced the thoughts of the Scotsman David Hume and the German Immanuel Kant.
Biography of George Berkeley
Early years and publications
George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1685 in County Kilkenny, Ireland. He was the eldest son of William Berkeley, a cadet of the noble Berkeley family. There are no clear records of who his mother was.
After several years of study at Kilkenny College, he attended Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of 15. Later, in that same institution, he finished his studies in 1707, where he also obtained the position of professor of Greek.
Berkeley ventured into the world of philosophy that same year, beginning to make philosophical notes, the so-called «philosophical comments.» These provided a rich documentation on Berkeley’s early evolution as a philosopher.
Berkeley’s Philosophical Notebooks provided readers with the ability to trace the rise of idealist philosophy from the critical response of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and others.
In 1709 he published his first important work, related to mathematics, in which he examined visual distance, magnitude, position, and problems of sight and touch. Although this essay generated a number of controversies, its conclusions are now accepted as part of the theory of optics.
A year later he published the Treatise on the principles of human knowledge and in 1713 the Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Tour of Europe and return to Ireland
A year later Berkeley visited England and was welcomed into the circle of Addison, Pope, and Steele. Between 1714 and 1720, he interposed his academic endeavors by making extensive tours of Europe.
While completing his tour of the Old Continent as the tutor of a young man, Berkeley composed De Motua fragment in which he developed his views on the philosophy of science and articulated an instrumentalist approach to Newtonian dynamics.
After his tour, the Irishman returned to his homeland and resumed his position at Trinity College. Parallel to that, in 1721 he was ordained a priest in Ireland, obtaining his doctorate in theology; in fact, he held several conferences on this subject.
In 1724, he retired from Trinity when he was appointed Dean of Derry, an ecclesiastical office presiding over the cathedral chapter, after the bishop.
It was at that time that Berkeley began to think about his plan to found a university in Bermuda, so the following year he began his project to train ministers and missionaries in the Colony.
adventures in america
After obtaining a charter and promises of funding from the British Parliament, Berkeley set sail for America in 1728, accompanied by his wife, Anne Forster, a gifted and well-educated woman who upheld her husband’s philosophy until the day she died.
They spent three years in Newport, Rhode Island (United States), where they bought a plantation in Middletown. There are references that various American universities, especially Yale, benefited from Berkeley’s visit.
While in America, Berkeley wrote Alciphrona work directed against «free thinkers» whom he considered enemies of established Anglicanism.
While in Newport, he drew up plans for the ideal city he planned to build in Bermuda. He stayed on the plantation waiting for the money he was promised; however, political support collapsed, so they were forced to return to Britain in 1731.
George Berkeley and Anne had six children, of whom only four survived: Henry, George, William, and Julia; the other two died in infancy.
Bishop of Cloyne
In 1734 Berkeley was consecrated Bishop of Cloyne, Dublin, eventually completing his new library. In addition, his episcopate passed without any incidents.
Then, in 1737, he took a seat in the Irish House of Lords, and a year later published a work entitled A speech to magistrates and men in authority.
Cloyne’s headquarters was a house of worship and a social center during epidemics. In 1744 he published his work entitled sirisa series of philosophical reflections and a treatise on the medicinal virtues of tar water.
In August 1752 George commissioned his brother, Robert Berkeley, as vicar general; afterwards, he took a house in Holywell with his wife and two of his children (George and Julia) where he resided until his death.
Death
On January 14, 1753, he died and was buried in the chapel of Christ Church.
Thought of George Berkeley
Empiricism
Empiricism explains that knowledge is derived from experience, that is, everything that the human being can know comes from a sensory experience. Berkeley maintains that same position of empiricism, only with certain differences in some arguments.
In this sense, the Irish philosopher denies the existence of material substances and says that the existence of substances depends on perception.
For Berkeley, anything that can be perceived through any sense (color, hardness, smell, etc.) is an «idea» or sensation that cannot exist without being perceived.
Berkeley in several of his works explained this argument with examples: trees and books are simply collections of «ideas» and, as such, they cannot exist if «the idea» is not in mind.
Although some of the ideas of empiricism were aligned with the main idea of Berkeley in which he establishes that knowledge comes from a sensory experience, for him there is a separation between the physical world and the mental world.
Berkeley argued that the cause of sensations is not purely caused by physical matter; rather, the existence of a tree is a collection of ideas attached to the human mind. If the mind is not there, the tree does not exist.
Immaterialism or subjective idealism
Immaterialism, also called subjective idealism (a name that was assigned to it later), consists of a new metaphysical version that affirms that the reality that human beings can know is fundamentally mental, that is, immaterial.
Berkeley was the one who revived idealism in eighteenth-century Europe using skeptical arguments against materialism.
According to the idealistic view, consciousness exists before and is a prerequisite for material existence; that is, consciousness creates and determines the material, not the other way around.
Idealism believes that consciousness and the mind are the origin of the material world, and its main objective is to explain the existing world according to these principles.
For Berkeley, materialists are forced to accept that objects actually seen and touched have only an intermittent existence, arising when they are perceived and passing into nothingness when they are no longer perceived.
In this sense, Berkeley respected and understood the materialist principles, but did not accept them.
George Berkeley’s contributions to philosophy and science
Arguments from relativity
In previous years, Locke had defined two fundamental pillars: the distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities and the materialist position. In this sense, Locke came to the conclusion that an object can be defined by its primary and secondary qualities.
On the contrary, George Berkeley affirms, through an example, that the size is not a quality of an object because it depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or on the size of the observer.
Taking into account that the object has a different size in the eyes of the observers, then the size is not part of the quality of an object.
Later he affirmed that neither the secondary nor the primary qualities are of the object.
The new theory of vision
Berkeley made several arguments against classical optics scholars, arguing that space cannot be seen directly, nor can its shape be logically deduced using the laws of optics.
Berkeley explained his theory by means of an example: distance is perceived indirectly in the same way that a person’s embarrassment is perceived indirectly: by looking at an embarrassed person, we infer that the person is embarrassed by looking at his flushed face.
In this way, it is known from experience that a red face indicates shame, since it has been learned to associate the two.
Berkeley claims that visual cues from an object can only be used to judge indirectly because the viewer learns to associate visual cues with tactile sensations.
philosophy of physics
From Berkeley’s earliest works to his latest he displayed a great commitment to science. He argued that the forces of gravity, as defined by Isaac Newton, consisted of «hidden qualities» that did not express anything clearly.
Berkeley held that those who postulated «something unknown in an unknown body, which they call the ‘principle of motion,’ is likewise unknown.»
Berkeley comments that if physicists affirm a number of precepts that cannot be verified through experience, or for example, if they refer to «soul» or «incorporeal thing», then it does not belong to physics.
Therefore, he concluded that the forces were beyond any kind of empirical observation and could not be part of a proper science; hence, he proposed his theory of signs as means to explain motion and matter without reference to the «hidden qualities» of force and gravity.
Berkeley Works
Essay of a new theory of vision
Berkeley published this essay in 1709, making it one of his most relevant early works. In this essay he succeeded in examining, first of all, spatial perception, visual distance, magnitude, position, and vision and touch problems.
After several analyzes embodied in the work, he concluded that the real objects of sight are not and do not exist without the mind, although the truth is that they are tangible.
Berkeley commented in his book that he wanted to account for the perception of distance, size and location of objects with the same…