Great Ideas of Philosophy

2. Make it large enough so that we can enter it and look around.3. We will see moving parts but “never anything by which to explain a perception.” Never an idea, nevera color, none of the things that we say the mind contains.4. This will be true however complex the machine is made.III. George Berkeley (1685–1753), bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, scientist and clergyman, will reach a similarconclusion from a different direction. He asserts that materialism is untenable because the material world has noindependent existence at all.A. Berkeley was recognized as preeminent in the field of optics.B. He was among the first to set down the basic principles of monocular and binocular depth perception. Hewas also an expert on the subject of perspective.C. Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Knowledge begins with a commonsense account of whatwe can plausibly claim to know—ideas actually imprinted on the senses, perceived by the operations of themind, or formed via memory and imagination.D. Added to ideas thus formed is a perceiving, active entity, which Berkeley calls “mind, spirit, soul, ormyself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them.”E. This leads Berkeley to his famous position on the theory that there is an independently existing materialworld. Against Locke’s division of qualities, Berkeley contends that the distinction is empty. The so-calledprimary qualities and secondary qualifiers are ideas and, as such, can be like nothing but another idea.F. Moreover, Berkeley asks how it is possible for there to exist independent material bodies needing no mindas a condition of their existence. He asserts all that is knowable are ideas (perceptions, sensations, images,and thoughts all being “ideas”) and that an idea can only be like another idea.1. The idea of a chair is not itself wooden, angular, and subject to be sat upon! As in Leibniz’s machine,there is no material chair discoverable inside our heads.2. A chair, as an ontologically existing entity, is only an aggregate of all its attributes.3. Thus everything remains: tables and chairs and stars and sunsets. We must, however, change ourdefinition of what these things are. They are ideas that subsist (not exist) in the mind of a percipient:ourselves, in the case of particular things; God, in the case of the whole.IV. Berkeley, quite comfortable with an empiricistic ontology, stretched it to the end of its conceptual tether inan argument that is both amusing and not transparently false—that the material world has no existenceindependent of our (or God’s) idea of it.Recommended Reading:Berkeley, G. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1997.Leibniz, G. The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. Robert Latta, trans. Oxford University Press, 1981Luce, A. A. Berkeley’s Immaterialism. New York, 1968.Questions to Consider:1. Appraise the validity of the following: If a tree falls in a forest and is never heard, does it make a sound?2. Explain whether Berkeley is denying that there is an external world of matter.3. If Leibniz is right, conclude whether it is even possible that the brain causes perceptions or has anything incommon with them.16©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership