George Berkeley

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was a brilliant critic of his predecessors, and
was one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. A talented metaphysician
famous for defending idealism, the view that reality consists only of minds and their
ideas. Berkeleys philosophical notebooks (Philosophical Commentaries) in 1707
provide the rich documentation of his early philosophical evolution, a track of the
emergence of his immaterialist philosophy. He published his first important work, An
Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), an influential contribution to the
psychology of vision an also developed doctrines relevant to his idealist project. In his
mid-twenties, he published, the Treatrise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (1710) and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonus (1713).

Berkeley defends idealism by attacking the materialist alternative. Materialism is

defined as the doctrine that material things exist and only material things exist. Berkeley
believes that not only material things exist, but what also exist are immaterial things. He
rejects the idea that material things are mind-independent things or substances,
something whose existence is not dependent on thinking things (mind) existed. He
holds that there are no such mind-independent things, in his famous phrase, esse est
percipi (aut percipere) to be is to be perceived (or to perceive).

Berkeley accuses that materialism promotes skepticism and atheism: skepticism

because it implies that our senses mislead us as to the natures of these material things,
and atheism because a material world could be expected to run without the existence of
God. This motivated him to question materialism. For Berkeley, you can have an idea
even without having seeing a material; but for the materialists, you have to sense the
materials to have an idea. He contends as a representationalist that we could have our
ideas without there being any external objects causing them. Although for him, there is
no material world, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary subjects. This world is
mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being
perceived.

Berkeley presents his likeness principle that has the following arguments: fist,
we perceive ordinary subjects; second, we perceive only ideas; therefore, third, ordinary
objects are ideas. He assumes that resemblance allows an idea to represent a material
object. He said that there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park,
or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them: there is no difficulty in it.
Another argument of his is that we cannot represent without conceiving because we
have never experience it. We cannot represent unconceivedness, we cannot conceive
of mind-independent objects.
 For Berkeley, the distinction between real thins and imaginary ones is suggested
by his argument for the existence of God. That ideas which depend on our own finite
human will are not real things. Spirits for Berkeley are totally different in kind from ideas,
for they are active where ideas are passive. As it perceives ideas it is called the
understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them it is called will.
Berkeleys ontology is God; himself a spirit, but an infinite one and that Gods existence
causes a control over our sensory ideas.