Bishop Berkely: Idealism

Bishop Berkely: Idealism

1. Perception

   • 1. He argued that the objects of sensation, our sense-data, must depend on us in the sense that if we stopped hearing or tasting or seeing or perceiving, then the sense-data could not continue to exist.
     • 2. Since sense-data existed in the mind, then all things that could be known existed in a mind.
       • 3. Reality was a product of some mind, and any "thing" not in some other mind does not exist.

2. "Ideas?"

   • 1. Berkeley called the pieces of sense-data, or things that could be immediately known, "ideas."
     • 2. Memories and things imagined could also be immediately known by virtue of the way the mind works and were also called ideas.
   • Nothing could possibly exist or be known except these "ideas."

3. Examples?

   • A tree
     • 1. Something like a tree exists, according to Berkeley, because someone perceives it.
       • 2. What is real about a tree exists in its perception
         • an idea from which the famous philosophic idiom: esse is percipi derives; the tree's being is in its being perceived.
           • esse is percipi
             • “TO BE IS TO BE PERCEIVED”
               • According to this argument, all of the qualities attributed to objects are sense qualities.
         • But what if no human perceives the tree?
           • 1. Berkeley admitted belief in an external world independent of humans.
             • 2.a His philosophy held that the world and everything in it was an idea in the mind of God.
             • 2.b What we call a real thing is the continuing "physical" object or permanent idea in God's mind.
               • 3. Our minds participate in God's perceptions, and thus different people's differing perceptions of the same object are variable but similar because each is of a piece with the same thing.