Berkeley was born in Kilkenny, Ireland. He attended Kilkenny College and later Trinity College in Dublin. After, he was ordained as an Anglican churchman and eventually became the bishop of Coyne, Ireland. Berkeley was a scientist; one of his first publications was an analysis of vision. He also attempted to found a new college in Bermuda, a project that was never funded. While waiting for the funds that never arrived, he lived for three years in Newport, Rhode Island. However, his idealist (or immaterial)
Marginal definition: idealism-the monistic belief that reality is only found in the mind through the act of perception.
philosophy remains the principal source of his fame. Berkeley used idealism to simultaneous counter Descartes’ dualism, Hobbes’ materialism, and Locke’s version of empiricism.
FYI-Understanding Idealism: Imagine that all you perceive only exists in your mind. In other words, your mind created your parents, siblings, house, and clothes; in short, it created everything. Now think whether that could be possible. It could be possible, but only if you were willing to assume that your mind was the only one in the world that could do that. Another possibility could be that every mind in the world is somehow simultaneously tuned to the same mental reality. So, when you perceive your friends, they perceive you, and, even more astoundingly, they perceive the same things you do. All of you are in the same room, the walls are painted the same color, and you all agree upon the clothing each is wearing. That kind of idealism is even more outlandish than the first form just described. So, how could a rational person justify idealism? Berkeley justified his version of idealism by using God’s mind. You and your friends all simultaneously perceive the consistent but ideal reality created by His mind. Like Descartes, Berkeley required God as an essential component of his philosophy.
Berkeley wished to prevent philosophy from degenerating into skepticism, or worse, into atheism. He saw the materialist accounts of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke as inevitably leading in that direction.
Thus, Berkeley is simultaneously attacking the dualism of Descartes and Locke along with the materialistic monism of Hobbes. Berkeley described his approach as esse est percipi (to be is to perceive). His approach to philosophy confounded many of his contemporaries. However, Berkeley insisted that his approach was logical and commonsensical. Most of his criticisms were directed against Locke’s empiricism. Specifically, Berkeley disagreed with him over the relationship of ideas to real things. For Berkeley, only ideas were real. Ideas, in turn, could only refer to other ideas. By first denying the existence of anything other than mental constructs, Berkeley could safely deny any relationship between ideas and anything else. Simply stated, there was nothing else. Berkeley maintained that Locke’s primary qualities could not exist. For example, size was no longer a primary quality of an object. Instead, size was simply a perception. Things looked bigger up close and smaller when farther away. Similar logic applied to the other primary qualities of mass, location, movement, texture, and degree of solidity. They all came from the act of perception. Through his emphasis on perception, Berkeley moved philosophy closer to psychology. The earliest scientific psychologists attempted to experimentally determine how perception worked. While psychologists have uncovered much about perception since the 19th century, a complete account still remains in the future. In many ways, Berkeley’s philosophy anticipated that of David Hume who extended many of Berkeley’s ideas and in the process became the most influential of all of the British empiricists. Hume carried the ideas of Locke and Berkeley to their logical conclusions and ended up rejecting metaphysics while placing nearly the whole of his philosophy on the back of perception. His philosophy also minimized the role of rationalism. It was not until after Immanuel Kant’s response to Hume that a revised and integrated form of moral philosophy arose and laid the groundwork for the creation of the early forms of psychology. Hume’s system of philosophy inspired a rationalist response much as Descartes’ system had done for the earlier empiricist response.