Easton Press George Berkeley books
Selected Writings of George Berkeley - Library of The Great Philosophers
Works of George Berkeley - Harvard Classics - 1993
Franklin Library George Berkeley books
Works of George Berkeley, John Locke and David Hume - Great Books of the Western World - 1984
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George Berkeley biography
George Berkeley was born in Dysert Castle, near Thomastown, Ireland. He attended Trinity College, Dublin completing a masters degree in 1707. He remained at Trinity College after completion of his degree as a tutor and Greek lecturer. In the period between 1714 and 1720 he interspersed his academic endeavours with periods of extensive travel in Europe. In 1721, he took Holy Orders, earning his doctorate in divinity, and once again chose to remain at Trinity College Dublin lecturing this time in Divinity and in Hebrew. In 1728 he sailed for the Americas with the goal of establishing a college and utopian community in Bermuda. He landed near Newport Rhode Island where he bought a farm to live on while he waited for funds for his college to arrive. However the funds were not forthcoming and in 1732 he returned to London. In 1734, he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne where he remained until 1752, when he retired and went to Oxford to live with his son.
The city of Berkeley, California is named after him, but the pronunciation of its name has evolved to suit American speech.
Philosophy
Born in Ireland, Berkeley's theorizing was Empiricism at its most extreme. As a young man, Berkeley theorized that the objects we perceive exist precisely as they appear to the senses. Objective knowledge is possible because the perceived object is the only object that exists. There is no "real" object which is the substratum of the perceived object. There is no "real" object (no matter) "behind" the object as we perceive it, which "causes" our perceptions. All that exists is the object as we perceive it, and this is the real object.
Since the object we perceive is the only object that exists, the object is precisely as it appears and, if we need to speak at all of the "real" or "material" object (the latter in particular being a confused term which Berkeley sought to dispose of), it is this perceived object to which all such names should exclusively refer.
This arouses the question whether this perceived object is "objective" in the sense of being "the same" for our fellow humans, in fact if even the concept of other human beings (beyond our perception of them) is valid. Berkeley argues that since we experience other humans in the way they speak to us—something which is not originating from any activity of our own—and since we learn that their view of the world is consistent with ours, we can believe in their existence and in the world being identical (similar) for everyone.
It follows that:
Our perceptions of objects are all perfectly accurate and objective.
Any knowledge of the empirical world is to be obtained only through direct perception.
Error comes about through thinking about what we perceive.
Knowledge of the empirical world of people and things and actions around us may be purified and perfected merely by stripping away all thought (and with it language) from our pure perceptions.
From this it follows that:
The ideal form of scientific knowledge is to be obtained by pursuing pure de-intellectualized perceptions.
If we would pursue these, we would be able to obtain the deepest insights into the natural world and the world of human thought and action which is available to man.
The goal of all science, therefore, is to de-intellectualize or de-conceptualize, and thereby purify, our perceptions.
Theologically, one consequence of Berkeley's views is that they require God to be present as an immediate cause of all our experiences. God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university's quadrangle. Rather, my perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in mine, and the tree continue to exist in the Quad when "nobody" is there simply because God is always there.
The philosophy of David Hume concerning causality and objectivity is an elaboration of another aspect of Berkeley's philosophy. Immanuel Kant mischaracterized Berkeley as a radical idealist and falsely claimed that Berkeley's principles make objective knowledge impossible. As Berkeley's thought progressed, he more or less completely assimilated his theories to those of Plato.
Over a century later Berkeley's thought experiment was satirised in a limerick and reply by Ronald Knox;
There was a young man who said "God,
I find it exceedingly odd,
That the willow oak tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd,
For I'm always about in the Quad;
And that's why the tree
Continues to be."
Signed "Yours faithfully, GOD."
In reference to Berkeley's philosophy, Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a heavy stone and exclaimed, "I refute it thus!" A philosophical empiricist might reply that the only thing that Dr. Johnson knew about the stone was what he saw with his eyes, felt with his foot, and heard with his ears. That is, the existence of the stone consisted exclusively of Dr. Johnson's perceptions. It might be possible that Dr. Johnson had actually kicked an unusually grey tree stump, or perhaps that a sudden attack of arthritis had flared up just when he was about to kick a random patch of grass with a painting of a rock. Whatever the stone really was, apart from the sensations that he felt and the ideas or mental pictures that he perceived, was completely unknown to him. The kicked stone existed, ultimately, as an idea in his mind, nothing more and nothing less.
Berkeley shows this in the Dialogues by saying we define an object by its primary and secondary qualities. He takes heat as an example of a secondary quality. If you put one hand in a bucket of cold water, and your other hand in a bucket of warm water, then put both hands in a bucket of luke warm water, one of your hands is going to tell you that the water is cold and the other that the water is hot. Berkeley says that since two different objects (your hands) perceive the water to be hot and cold, then the heat is not a quality of the water.
Primary qualities are treated the same way. Berkeley says that size is not a quality of an object because the size of the object depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or the size of observer. Since an object is a different size to different observers, then size is not a quality of the object. Berkeley refutes shape with a similar argument, then asks: if neither primary qualities nor secondary qualities are of the object, then how can we say that there is anything more than the qualities we observe?
Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was published three years before the publication of Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis, which made assertions similar to those of Berkeley. However, there seemed to have been no influence between the two writers.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote of him: "Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism…"
The Analyst Controversy
In addition to his contributions to philosophy, Bishop Berkeley was also very influential in the development of mathematics, although in a rather negative sense. In 1734 he published The Analyst, subtitled A DISCOURSE Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician. The infidel mathematician in question is believed to have been either Edmond Halley, or Isaac Newton himself, although the discourse would then have been posthumously addressed as Newton died in 1727. The Analyst represented a direct attack on the foundations and principles of calculus, and in particular the notion of fluxion or infinitesimal change which Newton and Leibniz had used to develop the calculus.
Berkeley regarded his criticism of calculus as part of his broader campaign against the religious implications of Newtonian mechanics – as a defence of traditional Christianity against deism, which tends to distance God from His worshippers.
As a consequence of the resulting controversy, the foundations of calculus were rewritten in a much more formal and rigorous form using limits. It was not until 1966, with the publication of Abraham Robinson's book Non-standard Analysis, that the concept of the infinitesimal was made rigorous, thus giving an alternative way of overcoming the difficulties which Berkeley discovered in Newton's original approach.
Commemoration
Berkeley's influence is reflected in the institutions of education named in his honour. Both University of California, Berkeley, and the city that grew up around the university, were named after him, although the pronunciation has evolved to suit American English (pronounced /bûrkli/ like Burke-Lee). The naming was suggested in 1866 by a trustee of the then College of California, Frederick Billings. Billings was inspired by Berkeley's Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, particularly the final stanza: "Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last." A residential college and an Episcopal seminary at Yale University also bear Berkeley's name, as does the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, Dublin.
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