Modified: 2025-01-08 1:07 PM
- Anglican churchman (Bishop Berkeley)
- Believed materialism led to skepticism and later atheism
- Wrote: Esse est percipi (to be is to perceive)
- Attacking both Descartes' dualism AND Hobbes' materialism
- All of the primary qualities came from perception
- He claimed that only ideas existed and they existed in God's mind
- No primary qualities existed
- Understanding idealism:
- 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.
Idealism-the monistic belief that reality is only found in the mind through the act of perception. Consider how idealism might work: only through your mind, through a vast conspiracy, or through God's mind.
- Moved philosophy closer to psychology (e.g., via Sensation & Perception)
- BTW, and in a strange juxtaposition, Berkeley, CA is named after him
- Matriculated at U. of Edinburgh at age 12
- Did not get a degree
- Commonplace occurrence then
- Worked as a clerk as shipping house
- Wrote: A Treatise on Human Understanding
- Was 26 years old
- Wrote in France at La Fleche, Descartes old school
- Book did not do well
- Later, as a librarian, he wrote a history book that sold well
- History of England was the book
- Gave him lifetime income
- Never had a academic position (too controversial)
- His published views on philosophy were too controversial
- Especially his negative views on religion
- He hosted Jean Jacques Rousseau for a while
- That relationship ended badly
- Goals for his philosophy
- Rid philosophy of metaphysics
- Improve the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley
- Create a science of human nature
- But, he left little room for consciousness or pre-existing mental categories
- To improved empiricism, he added
- Impressions
- vivid
- precursors of ideas
- ideas were secondary but still simple and complex
- New mechanisms
- Resemblance
- Continuity
- Both were extension of Locke's views
- Cause and Effect
- New and different way of looking at it
- It came from perception not from a priori knowledge
- It was a kind of pattern recognition
- In other words, cause was inferred AFTER a series of events
- Spoiler Alert: Skinner's definition of reinforcement is essentially Hume's (see chapter 10)
- Definitions:
- must be reducible to simple ideas or they are false.
- Thus, metaphysical terms were false because they could not be so reduced
- Mitigated Skepticism
- Impressions or ideas always true
- Beliefs may be wrong
- E.g., water hitting window
- (See text (p. 182): water WAS hitting the window, but it was not raining (the mistaken belief). Observation showed that someone outside was hosing off the window
- Passions
- Have priority over rational thought (Unlike Descartes)
- Innate
- Direct
- Indirect
- pride
- shame
- love
- hate
- But the above were still related to pain/pleasure and good/evil
- Moral Judgments
- based on experience, not reason
- from pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain
- Benevolence over Self-Interest
- Benevolence part of human nature but differed by society
- Did not want to use self-interest to explain social behavior
- Wide ranging interests: economics, history of ideas, esthetics, religion
- Anti-religious
- Laid foundation for empirical, materialistic, and behavioral psychology predicated on primacy of perception
- Inspired Immanuel Kant to argue against him (see chapter 6)
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