George Berkeley

Born: 1685

Died: 1753, at the age of 67

Country of origin: Ireland

Major Books written by George Berkeley:

• "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" (1710)
  
• "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" (1713)
  
• "The Analyst" (1734)

Cocktail summary of George Berkeley's main ideas:

George made a career out of insisting that "seeing is believing". He took the scientific method to it's logical conclusion and decided that observation defined existence. An object only exists if it is observed. Therefore, if a tree falls in the middle of a forest and there is no one there to see it, it never happened.

Most of his contemporaries thought he was nuts, but he sincerely believed this. External reality has no concrete existence on its own, but only exists due to our sensing it. He didn't believe that un-observed trees in the forest don't exist since, he argued, God perceives them, so they exist thanks to the all-seeing observation of God. But if God were to stop observing a tree, for instance, we could never be certain that it exists.

His idea was an application of the strict scientific method, and is still alive today. For example, light will behave as either a wave or as a particle, depending on if you're looking for waves or looking for particles. It's existence, in a sense, is dependent on how we observe it. Berkeley was the first person to suggest this, and his idea is often used as a sign-post in the philosophical school of Empiricism, leading up to David Hume who decided that we can never even talk about reality, only about raw sensations.

His ideas are categorized as so-called "Immaterialiasm", which simply means if you don't see it, it ain't there. It is basically extreme Empiricism. His ideas are also often called an example of "Idealism", which is a branch of philosophy that argues that all our knowledge is nothing more than a collection of ideas, created by some kind of sensory input. The real world can never be known, only our ideas about the world.

In other words, if Berkeley ever got a bill in the mail, he probably wouldn't pay it since he couldn't be sure if it really existed....

George Berkeley praised & criticized:

• Many of Berkeley's contemporaries thought he'd been sneaking a few too many sips of Sacramental Wine on the side. One of the more famous denouncements of his ideas came from the English writer Samuel Johnson who, after hearing about Berkeley's arguments about reality being contingent, kicked a rock on the ground and yelled "I refute him thus!" Taken at first glance, his ideas seemed to be little more than the bizarre musings of a bishop from a country whose most famous contribution to civilization would be Guinness beer.
  
  But his ideas are important when following the evolution of philosophy ever since Descartes. Descartes had looked for the source of true, irrefutable knowledge and had decided that true certainty came from self-analysis. Over the next 200 years this idea branched out into the 2 broad approaches of Philosophy: Rationalism - the argument that there are some "naked ideas" that exist in the mind, independent of external reference - and Empiricism - the argument that we have no knowledge that does not have our sensory input as its source. Berkeley stood in the flow of Empiricism, and followed the school of thought to its logical extreme.
  
  It's difficult to say how seriously he applied his ideas to daily life. If he got a parking ticket due to hitching his horse to the wrong post, did he ignore it as long as he didn't perceive it? Or were his ideas more of a rhetorical exercise in the limits of Empiricism? In other words, was he just being sarcastic? It appears that we was at least publicly serious, and his ideas were famously picked up by his more famous contemporary up in Scotland, David Hume, who would carry the discipline to almost a dead-end.

Notable Facts about George Berkeley:

• Religious affiliation:
  George Berkeley was a Catholic priest, and religion played a central role in his life. His belief in God saved him from denying the existence of the real world, since he argued that as long as God looked down from heaven and kept perceiving the world, then reality still existed. So his theology served as a sort of safety-net under his acrobatic philosophy.
  
  
• Berkeley was interested in the island of Bermuda, although he never set foot there. He had a big idea that involved buying land on Bermuda, in order to create a training college for ministers that were going to the Colonies in North America. Students would be sent to Bermuda, get trained, then continue on to America to convert slaves to Christianity. George was a firm believer in the institution of slavery, and felt it was his duty to save the souls of those who were enslaved. He actually moved to Rhode Island in 1728 and bought a plantation called Whitehall. He remained there for 4 years, trying to convince friends back in England to send him money to support his mission. He had initially been promised 20,000 pounds by the English government to help fun his idea, but it never materialized. Eventually he decided that his idea had sunk, and he moved back to London in 1732. (Incidentally, since Berkeley never set eyes on Bermuda, does it really exist...?)
  
  
• 2 years after returning from America, in 1734, Berkeley was promoted to Bishop, of the diocese of Cloyne, in Ireland.
  
  
• Despite being suspicious about the very existence of the universe, George apparently had a way with ladies. One night in 1723 he attended a dinner which was attended by a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, who had been romantically involved with Jonathan Swift, but whom had recently dumped her (probably because Swift's wife didn't care much for her, and Miss Vanhomrigh didn't know he was married). She was apparently quite taken by the Irish skeptic over dinner that night and, perhaps as a way to get back at Swift, who was a friend of Berkeley's, she left half of all her property to Berkeley when she died. Philosophers aren't usually known for their charm at dinner parties...
  
  
• The city of Berkeley in California is named after George. The idea of naming the city after the skeptical Irishman supposedly first happened shortly after the American Civil War, when one day a local resident was watching a ship sail out of the San Francisco Bay and out to sea. This person was reminded of a line of poetry that Berkeley once wrote, where he said "Westward the course of Empire takes its way." So the city was named because of Berkeley's poetry.
  
  The name of the city is actually pronounced wrong. The philosopher pronounced his last name as "Bark-Lee", which is different from how the city's name is pronounced today.
  
  
• Berkeley died suddenly, of an unknown cause, on January 14th, 1753, while at Oxford with his son. He is buried there, at Christ Church.
  
  

Quotes:

• "Esse est percipi" (Latin, for "To be is to be perceived")
  
  
• "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."
  
  
• "All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind."
  
  
• "We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things."
  
  
• "Westward the course of Empire takes its way. The four first acts already past. A fifth shall close the drama with the day. Time's noblest offspring is the last." (Published in "Verses, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America")