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Philosophical Writings
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was a university teacher, a missionary, and later a Church of Ireland bishop. The over-riding objective of his long philosophical career was to counteract objections to religious belief that resulted from new philosophies associated with the Scientific Revolution. Accordingly, he argued against scepticism and atheism in the Principles and the Three Dialogues; he rejected theories of force in the Essay on Motion; he offered a new theory of meaning for religious language in Alciphron; and he modified his earlier immaterialism in Siris by speculating about the body's influence on the soul. His radical empiricism and scientific instrumentalism, which rejected the claims of the sciences to provide a realistic interpretation of phenomena, are still influential today. This edition provides texts from the full range of Berkeley's contributions to philosophy, together with an introduction by Desmond M. Clarke that sets them in their historical and philosophical contexts.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
386 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1965
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About the author
George Berkeley
639 books231 followersGeorge Berkeley (/ˈbɑːrklɪ/;[1][2] 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753) — known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne) — was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
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Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
George^Berkeley
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 2, 2013
This volume includes Berkeley's main philosophical works (New Theory of Vision, Principles of Human Knowledge, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, and An Essay on Motion), as well as philosophical excerpts from Alciphron (a work of Christian apologetics) and Siris (a treatise on the health benefits of drinking a medieval tonic called tar water).
The quality is uneven. The Essay on Motion and excerpts from Siris contain little of interest to the modern reader. Alciphron is interesting, but largely recycles material from the main works, and can be skipped.
The New Theory of Vision is a fascinating essay--Berkeley at his best. One of his most penetrating ideas is that there is no necessary connection between the tangible and visible world, and that the images we see are a language of symbols whose reference to the tangible must be painstakingly learned through experience. This was a revolutionary, counter-intuitive idea in 1732, and in many ways it remains so today. But over time Berkeley has been vindicated. One of the best examples is the story of Virgil in the "To See and Not See" chapter of Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars (a great companion read to the NTV).
Virgil was blinded in early childhood, and had his vision surgically restored at the age of 50. Like many others with restored vision, he found it almost impossible to make sense of his visual impressions. As predicted by both Locke and Berkeley, people like Virgil are generally incapable of visually recognizing objects they know by touch. Indeed, the process of learning to see is very much like learning a foreign language. Dr. Sacks recounts episodes where Virgil would examine his cat Tibbles, "carefully, looking at its head, its ears, its paws, its tail, and touching each part gently as he did so." Sacks call this process "correlating the cat." Virgil's wife Amy wondered why he kept doing it over and over--"You'd think once was enough," she said--but the correlations "kept slipping from his mind." Observing a similar patient, Chelseden (the first surgeon to restore a patient's sight in the 18th century) noted: "Upon being told what things were... he would carefully observe that he might know them again; and at first learned to know and again forgot, a thousand things a day." This experience, of learning and forgetting a thousand things a day, is a familiar experience to anyone who has acquired a foreign language, and shows the power of Berkeley's theory. It also explains why many newly sighted adults have great difficulty transitioning into "seeing" people. They have lost the ability to absorb language which they had as a child, and that impedes their learning the "foreign language" of vision.
Another interesting point Berkeley makes is that distance, size, objects and so forth, are things which normally-sighted people "inject" into the images they see -- rather like we imaginatively inject different perspectives into a reversible figure like the Necker Cube. They are not something that is actually in the image itself. For example, Berkeley claimed that a newly sighted person, with no experience at all of vision, would perceive an image as a variegated, mutating pattern inside of himself, not something external, having size, distance or perspective. And newly sighted people do indeed have strange experiences of this sort: seeing street lights as "luminous stains stuck to window panes," hospital corridors as "black holes," or people moving away as simply getting smaller. Some early physicians who treated newly sighted patients remarked that they "saw little more than patches of color" or saw images of three-dimensional scenes as something akin to animated abstract art, "parti-colored planes, or surfaces diversified with variety of paint."
This is potent food-for-thought, even today. It's odd how the "gap" between touch and sight is reminiscent of the gap between mind and body. Is there an analogy here, MIND:BODY :: SIGHT:TOUCH? When people speak of the blind material which makes up the universe, is that the sense of touch talking about its world? What if we took a person stripped of all sense but vision, and another person stripped of everything but touch. Could they communicate? Wouldn't they be as impossibly out-of-touch with each other as Descartes' extended, material body and unextended, immaterial mind?
The other two important works in this volume are the Principles, and the Dialogues, and here we encounter the visionary Berkeley--the grandfather of virtual reality and "The Matrix." Personally, I prefer the Dialogues, but the Principles are also excellent. Reading Berkeley in the original, it is interesting to see how his views are often distorted by commentators. Berkeley is most closely associated with the idea that "to be is to be perceived," but this often becomes a caricature where things pop in and out of existence when people aren't looking, and the only thing maintaining a stable reality is God (who functions like the computer running the Matrix, except with a halo and a long white beard). But Berkeley is more grounded and commonsensical than that. After all, his philosophy is based on the very backbone of science: rigorous, uncompromising empiricism! In the Dialogues and the Principles, Berkeley suggests a number of times that things continue to exist as long as *any mind* is perceiving them, and that brings us very close to bedrock reality, as described by modern quantum mechanics--for example, in the double-slit experiment, where an electron behaves like a wave when it is not observed, but like a particle when it is; or like Schrodinger's Cat, who is in a superposition of two states (dead & alive) until an observer perceives him and collapses him into one state or the other. The idea of reality misbehaving when no one is looking is now part of mainstream science, and once again Berkeley's "crazy ideas" have been vindicated.
This has been a long review, but I've only pointed out a few of the highlights in this book. Steer clear of the dead wood, and you've got a highly-readable, concise, five-star philosophy read here. Berkeley was surely one of the most innovative, bold and prescient of all philosophers, and reading his best works (NTV, Principles and Dialogues) is very rewarding. He's gotten so much right so far, it's hard to bet against Berkeley, even at his wildest.
The quality is uneven. The Essay on Motion and excerpts from Siris contain little of interest to the modern reader. Alciphron is interesting, but largely recycles material from the main works, and can be skipped.
The New Theory of Vision is a fascinating essay--Berkeley at his best. One of his most penetrating ideas is that there is no necessary connection between the tangible and visible world, and that the images we see are a language of symbols whose reference to the tangible must be painstakingly learned through experience. This was a revolutionary, counter-intuitive idea in 1732, and in many ways it remains so today. But over time Berkeley has been vindicated. One of the best examples is the story of Virgil in the "To See and Not See" chapter of Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars (a great companion read to the NTV).
Virgil was blinded in early childhood, and had his vision surgically restored at the age of 50. Like many others with restored vision, he found it almost impossible to make sense of his visual impressions. As predicted by both Locke and Berkeley, people like Virgil are generally incapable of visually recognizing objects they know by touch. Indeed, the process of learning to see is very much like learning a foreign language. Dr. Sacks recounts episodes where Virgil would examine his cat Tibbles, "carefully, looking at its head, its ears, its paws, its tail, and touching each part gently as he did so." Sacks call this process "correlating the cat." Virgil's wife Amy wondered why he kept doing it over and over--"You'd think once was enough," she said--but the correlations "kept slipping from his mind." Observing a similar patient, Chelseden (the first surgeon to restore a patient's sight in the 18th century) noted: "Upon being told what things were... he would carefully observe that he might know them again; and at first learned to know and again forgot, a thousand things a day." This experience, of learning and forgetting a thousand things a day, is a familiar experience to anyone who has acquired a foreign language, and shows the power of Berkeley's theory. It also explains why many newly sighted adults have great difficulty transitioning into "seeing" people. They have lost the ability to absorb language which they had as a child, and that impedes their learning the "foreign language" of vision.
Another interesting point Berkeley makes is that distance, size, objects and so forth, are things which normally-sighted people "inject" into the images they see -- rather like we imaginatively inject different perspectives into a reversible figure like the Necker Cube. They are not something that is actually in the image itself. For example, Berkeley claimed that a newly sighted person, with no experience at all of vision, would perceive an image as a variegated, mutating pattern inside of himself, not something external, having size, distance or perspective. And newly sighted people do indeed have strange experiences of this sort: seeing street lights as "luminous stains stuck to window panes," hospital corridors as "black holes," or people moving away as simply getting smaller. Some early physicians who treated newly sighted patients remarked that they "saw little more than patches of color" or saw images of three-dimensional scenes as something akin to animated abstract art, "parti-colored planes, or surfaces diversified with variety of paint."
This is potent food-for-thought, even today. It's odd how the "gap" between touch and sight is reminiscent of the gap between mind and body. Is there an analogy here, MIND:BODY :: SIGHT:TOUCH? When people speak of the blind material which makes up the universe, is that the sense of touch talking about its world? What if we took a person stripped of all sense but vision, and another person stripped of everything but touch. Could they communicate? Wouldn't they be as impossibly out-of-touch with each other as Descartes' extended, material body and unextended, immaterial mind?
The other two important works in this volume are the Principles, and the Dialogues, and here we encounter the visionary Berkeley--the grandfather of virtual reality and "The Matrix." Personally, I prefer the Dialogues, but the Principles are also excellent. Reading Berkeley in the original, it is interesting to see how his views are often distorted by commentators. Berkeley is most closely associated with the idea that "to be is to be perceived," but this often becomes a caricature where things pop in and out of existence when people aren't looking, and the only thing maintaining a stable reality is God (who functions like the computer running the Matrix, except with a halo and a long white beard). But Berkeley is more grounded and commonsensical than that. After all, his philosophy is based on the very backbone of science: rigorous, uncompromising empiricism! In the Dialogues and the Principles, Berkeley suggests a number of times that things continue to exist as long as *any mind* is perceiving them, and that brings us very close to bedrock reality, as described by modern quantum mechanics--for example, in the double-slit experiment, where an electron behaves like a wave when it is not observed, but like a particle when it is; or like Schrodinger's Cat, who is in a superposition of two states (dead & alive) until an observer perceives him and collapses him into one state or the other. The idea of reality misbehaving when no one is looking is now part of mainstream science, and once again Berkeley's "crazy ideas" have been vindicated.
This has been a long review, but I've only pointed out a few of the highlights in this book. Steer clear of the dead wood, and you've got a highly-readable, concise, five-star philosophy read here. Berkeley was surely one of the most innovative, bold and prescient of all philosophers, and reading his best works (NTV, Principles and Dialogues) is very rewarding. He's gotten so much right so far, it's hard to bet against Berkeley, even at his wildest.
April 29, 2021
+ he devoted a whole introduction to bullying John Locke
+ despite his ass-backwards method of beginning with his conclusion and demanding your patience as he justifies it, he somehow managed to present some insightful observations on language and absolute knowledge. it’s difficult to tell whether these conclusions were foreseen and intended, or rather accidental collateral of his attack on external reality
- he managed to produce the most insufferable Socratic Dialogue. his book is predicated on a radical assumption and he treats his interlocutor as a total blockhead for being reasonably skeptical of
- I do not like his method
- I do not like this man
+ despite his ass-backwards method of beginning with his conclusion and demanding your patience as he justifies it, he somehow managed to present some insightful observations on language and absolute knowledge. it’s difficult to tell whether these conclusions were foreseen and intended, or rather accidental collateral of his attack on external reality
- he managed to produce the most insufferable Socratic Dialogue. his book is predicated on a radical assumption and he treats his interlocutor as a total blockhead for being reasonably skeptical of
- I do not like his method
- I do not like this man
May 27, 2020
Berkeley is a very interesting philosopher. He has an ironic combination of a strict empiricism, which ties existence strictly to sense impressions (for instance, there is a long polemic of abstract ideas and he rejects the idea that space and time are absolute entities independent of the mind) with an ontological idealism that claims that all that exists are ideas and spirits. He does with this with the intention of debunking what he thinks of as a very dangerous ideas, namely, that there is such a thing as matter that exists independently of all thought. We might be able to imagine an object without it being perceived, but imagination shows that it is dependent on thought. The idea of matter leads to skepticism, because we can never be sure our perceptions match up with reality, and also materialism. God is the archetypal intellect that is conscious constantly of all ideas, and it is His mind that accounts for the lawfulness of the ideas we have. There is no causal realism between ideas, because they are simply inert modifications of the mind.
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