Churchman and philosopher
Irish philosopher. George Berkeley is born in an easy family, of English origin. It achieves its studies in Dublin; man of faith, confession Anglican, it acquires the conviction that, if science and philosophy purified each one on its side, it would result a wisdom completely in conformity from it with Christianity. He enters the orders and teaches the Greek, Hebrew and theology.
From 1713 to 1720, he travels through Europe (France, Italy, Spain) then, of return in Ireland, he becomes senior of Derry (1721-1727), thinking of devoting his life to this load. It is only after its important philosophical publications that he travels to America: Berkeley undertakes to go to propagate the Christian faith; it leaves for Rhode Island in 1728 but, for lack of funds, it must return to Great Britain since 1731. It is named bishop of Cloyne, in 1734, in the south of Ireland.
Throughout her work, George Berkeley will fight the materialism and the unbelief; he was an excellent prelate, extremely understanding for the Irish catholics, who represented the five sixth of the population of its bishopric. He spent his last years to Oxford, where he died.
The philosophy of Berkeley
It is remarkable that in the twenty-two years age Berkeley published one of the philosophical works most subtle which were ever written: its Theory of the vision, where it is tried to explain the development of the concept of space.
An idealistic theory
The following year, in its Principles of human knowledge, it develops the essence of its philosophy. It is caught some with the empiricism of Locke, which appears to him to make too much confidence with the old theories of the abstraction. In particular, the idea of a matter existing in oneself - and which would found the reality of our perceptions - is an indemonstrable abstraction.
The idealistic theory of Berkeley, which he proposes with much clearness and strength, is founded on the principle which “the gasoline of the objects consists of what they are perceived”. The things are known like ideas. They can be only ideas, because the feelings are pure ideas. As a God even, who creates them, they are ideas. The world is the thought of God. The matter does not exist, apart from the idea that we have some. One compares particular ideas to make a general idea and it is the fact of the abstraction.
A divine world
All the value of the science, removed from the false abstractions, thus rests on the significant certainty, on which Berkeley bases an original proof of the existence of God. “It is obvious for me, he writes, that the sensitive things can exist other share only in one understanding or a spirit, and I concluded from there, not that they do not have a real existence, but that waited until they do not depend on my thought or that they have an existence distinct from quality to be seen by me, it is necessary that there is some spirit in which they exist. Thus, as much it is certain as much that the sensitive world really exists, is it that there exists a spirit infinite and present everywhere which contains them and which supports them.”
The world is thus, for Berkeley, the whole of the ideas that God suggests with the human spirits. And if God thus communicates his thought or something of his thought to the men, it is to attract their heart. The world which proclaims God is not thus, in fact, which the language of God, thought by God, addressing itself to the men under the ideal methods that they take for the matter.
The immaterialism berkeleyen
The formula ess is percipi (“to be is to be perceived”) founds the idealism or rather the immaterialism berkeleyen: the body world exists only like object of perception; Berkeley leaves the feelings to show that by means of the directions we know only our perceptions; the material world is only the world of the phenomena. There is not beyond the perceived things, of substance, permanence; there are only spirits and the ideas of these spirits. Ess is percipi vel percipire: all the being of the bodies resides in the fact that they are perceived or that they are perceived. The cause of the significant modifications is as a God and this last speaks and directs our will to us through the nature, whose phenomena constitute.
The distinction established by Locke between “qualities first and qualities second” is refused by Berkeley which affirms that all qualities are subjective feelings.
This design makes it possible to escape skepticism born from the interrogation on the back-worlds (Treated on the principles of human knowledge, 1710). To its Test on a new theory of the vision (1709), Berkeley seconds the psychology of geometrical optics, by raising the question of what is the perception of space. This philosopher also wrote: Dialogs between Hylas and Philonoüs (1713); Alciphron (1732); Querist (1733-1737); Siris (1744).
Historically, the importance of Berkeley holds in this that he criticized the concept of matter whose obviousness had never been blamed by its contemporaries. By affirming that the object, such as it is perceived, does not exist independently of the understanding, Berkeley opens the royal roads of the idealistic philosophy, for which the matter does not exist in a way completely independent of the spirit.