George Berkeley: biography and work

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was one of the most important scientists of his time. In addition, he was a bishop, philosopher and humanist. Is very known for his empiricist philosophy and his defense of idealism. He was a scathing critic of the greatest philosophers who preceded him, such as Descartes and Locke.

Idealism tells us that everything exists to the extent that we can perceive it. with our senses, except the spiritual. His contributions ranged from philosophy to physics, including areas such as psychology, medicine and mathematics. A great thinker, with an extensive and influential work that is worth knowing and that today, in some way, we will try to rescue in this article.

Brief biography of George Berkeley

George Berkeley He was born in Dysert (Ireland) in 1685 and died in Cloyne (Ireland) in 1753. A distinguished student at Trinity College in Dublin, studied science and literature. Furthermore, he remained there as a teacher until he perfected his studies of Greek and Hebrew.

Always in contact with the work of great thinkers such as Locke, Hobbes, Descartes and Newton, he developed his own thinking: immaterialist or idealist philosophy. Between 1707-1710, he would publish various works of great relevance, among which the TRated on the principles of knowledge. In 1710, he was ordained an Anglican priest.

George Berkeley married Anne Foster in 1728., a very capable, intellectual woman who defended her husband’s philosophy until her last days. Between 1728 and 1731, she settled in the American colonies, specifically, Rhode Island. There, she hoped for funding from the King to create a missionary center and educate the locals.

Failing to obtain such financing, he decided to return to Europe, settling in London in 1732 and, later, in Cloyne. Once there and until 1744, he developed important works such as The Alciforme, The theory of vision either Siris. Tired and dejected by the death of one of his children, finally, He died in 1753, leaving behind a great scientific and philosophical legacy.

George Berkeley and philosophical idealism

Berkeley, contrary to Locke and Hobbes, embraced philosophical immaterialism. What exactly does this immaterialism consist of? For Berkeley, just We know things by their relationship to our senses, not by what they are in themselves.. In other words, we could only accept our mental representations as true.

Berkeley proposed the principle idealism, explaining that “the being of things” is their “being perceived”. In fact, the substance would not be matter, but only its spiritual substrate. According to Descartes, the spiritual is the fruit of our thoughts and this would be its irrefutable proof, its criterion of truth.

Descartes rejects the world of the senses, the senses deceive us and, therefore, we should not trust them. Knowledge for Descartes is innate and reason will guide us towards it. Descartes doubts everything and, at the moment when he is doubting, he is aware of his own existence: Cogito ergo sum. He is an imperfect being and yet he possesses the idea of ​​a perfect being: God. An imperfect being cannot have created something perfect, so who put the idea in his mind? The answer to this question cannot be other than God himself.

The other side of the coin is represented by Berkeley, whose empiricism is, to say the least, extreme.. We are no longer talking about knowing through the object, but rather the object is when it is perceived. However, if objects only exist as a result of our mental representations, there had to be something that remained outside our minds and drove our perceptions. That outside of us is nothing other than God.

Berkeley in his Tthree dialogues between Hylas and Filonús part of God as the driving force of every sensible cause (Hernández-Castro, 2017):

The objects of human knowledge are ideas, imprinted on the senses. Next to the ideas there is something that perceives them, that being, he called mind, spirit, soul, self. The ideas or sensations perceived by us are not produced or dependent of the will of men. Therefore, it is evident that we know God as surely and immediately as any other mind or spirit other than our own. What we see, hear, feel or otherwise perceive through the senses, It is a sign or effect of the power of God.

Thus, Berkeley and Descartes, although tremendously opposite, function as two sides of the same coin. With two very different theories regarding knowledge and metaphysics, but with the same answer: God.

George Berkeley and the psychology of vision

One of the things that Berkeley stands out for is his understanding of how we perceive and interact with objects. His main idea is that Our knowledge is only real if there is conformity between our ideas and not from the reality of things. Furthermore, he adds: “Having an idea is the same as perceiving”.

Following this paradigm, nothing that we perceive as such exists in nature. Therefore, exist can’t mean anything other than perceive And be perceived. In fact, this phenomenon can be seen in children, when they play hide-and-seek, they close their eyes to become invisible.

According to Berkeley, We do not see things in our environment, but we have ideas and, within them, we see things. As a consequence of perceiving objects with vision, they do not exist outside our mind. This is a completely revolutionary approach, which opens the doors to relativism. Each person sees and creates their own reality according to their own cognitions.

George Berkeley: final thoughts

Berkeley’s work raises two main problems:

The relationship between spirit and matter. The reality of the corporeal world outside us.

If Berkeley tries to reduce all experience to internal experience, then, we obtain that, in the mind, there are ideas and that, from them, they are deduced from sensations. This proposal would have great weight in philosophy and psychology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Rejecting the theses of important thinkers who preceded him, George Berkeley proposes that our mind is composed of an infinite set of ideas, which come from our experience with different sensations. Therefore, We do not operate with the objects themselves, but with our mental representations of said objects.

Thus, for Berkeley, everything that does not exist in our minds does not exist in our universe. This phrase is deeply reminiscent of what Wittgenstein would say a century later: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

Regarding its impact on psychology, Positions such as structuralism and cognitive psychology have, at least some of their antecedents in Berkeley’s ideas.. A scientist and thinker who helped us reveal a little more of the mysteries of the mind.

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