Jan 15, 2023 02:14 AM
(This post was last modified: Jan 15, 2023 02:21 AM by C C.)
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/blog/exclusive-...e-berkeley
INTRO: George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, is one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. He is a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. He is a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, that is, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections. His most-studied works, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Principles, for short) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (Dialogues), are beautifully written and dense with the sort of arguments that delight contemporary philosophers. He is also a wide-ranging thinker with interests in religion (which were fundamental to his philosophical motivations), the psychology of vision, mathematics, physics, morals, economics, and medicine. Although many of Berkeley’s first readers greet him with incomprehension, he influenced both Hume and Kant, and is much read (if little followed) in our own day.
EXCERPTS: [...] 3:16: You think philosophising can be dangerous though don't you?
GB: I’d put it like this Richard: It is a strange thing and deserves our attention, that the more time and pains men have consumed in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant and weak creatures. They discover flaws and imperfections in their faculties which other men never spy out.
They find themselves under a necessity of admitting many inconsistent, irreconcilable opinions for true. There is nothing they touch with their hand, or behold with their eyes, but has its dark sides much larger and more numerous than what is perceived, and at length turn skeptics, at least in most things. These men with a supercilious pride disdain the common single information of sense.
They grasp at knowledge by sheaves and bundles. It is well if, catching at too much at once, they hold nothing but emptiness and air. They in the depth of their understanding contemplate abstract ideas. It seems not improbable that the most comprehensive and sublime intellects see more at once, that is, that their visual systems are the largest.
3:16: So do you see what you’re doing as trying to reset the philosophers so they work on useful issues and stay within the bounds of common sense?
GB: Yes Richard. Though it seems the general opinion of the world that the end of speculation be practice, or the improvement and regulation of our lives and actions, yet those who are most addicted to speculative studies seem as generally of another mind. Philosophers are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arise skepticism and paradoxes. I
t is not enough that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing: its true nature, its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our faculties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives in doubting those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at and despise.
3:16: So you’re out to help philosophers avoid wasting their time and sticking to useful thinking?
GB: Yes Richard. In order to divert the busy mind of man from vain researches it seemed necessary to inquire into the source of its perplexities; and, if possible, to lay down such principles as, by an easy solution of them, together with their own native evidence, may at once recommend themselves for genuine to the mind, and rescue it from those endless pursuits it is engaged in.
[...] 3:16: In a way then, despite the initial weirdness of your ideas, you’re a common sense philosopher?
GB: Yes, I’m eternally banishing metaphysics and such like and recalling men to common sense. There are men who say there are insensible extensions. There are others who say the wall is not white, the fire is not hot, etc. We Irishmen cannot attain to these truths.
3:16: You say the true way of regarding the world we see and touch is to regard it as consisting of ideas or phenomena that are presented to human senses, somehow regularly ordered, and the occasions of pleasure or pain to us as we conform to or rebel against their natural order. Does this mean you don’t think there are things in themselves, independent of minds?
GB: Well Richard, I don’t know what is meant by things considered in themselves, that is, in abstraction. This is nonsense. ‘Thing’ and ‘idea’ are words of much about the same extent and meaning. Existence is not conceivable without perception and volition. I only declare the meaning of the word ‘existence’, as far as I can comprehend it. Pure intellect I understand not at all. It’s impossible anything besides that which thinks and is thought on should exist... (MORE - missing details, the interview)
INTRO: George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, is one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. He is a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. He is a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, that is, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections. His most-studied works, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Principles, for short) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (Dialogues), are beautifully written and dense with the sort of arguments that delight contemporary philosophers. He is also a wide-ranging thinker with interests in religion (which were fundamental to his philosophical motivations), the psychology of vision, mathematics, physics, morals, economics, and medicine. Although many of Berkeley’s first readers greet him with incomprehension, he influenced both Hume and Kant, and is much read (if little followed) in our own day.
EXCERPTS: [...] 3:16: You think philosophising can be dangerous though don't you?
GB: I’d put it like this Richard: It is a strange thing and deserves our attention, that the more time and pains men have consumed in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant and weak creatures. They discover flaws and imperfections in their faculties which other men never spy out.
They find themselves under a necessity of admitting many inconsistent, irreconcilable opinions for true. There is nothing they touch with their hand, or behold with their eyes, but has its dark sides much larger and more numerous than what is perceived, and at length turn skeptics, at least in most things. These men with a supercilious pride disdain the common single information of sense.
They grasp at knowledge by sheaves and bundles. It is well if, catching at too much at once, they hold nothing but emptiness and air. They in the depth of their understanding contemplate abstract ideas. It seems not improbable that the most comprehensive and sublime intellects see more at once, that is, that their visual systems are the largest.
3:16: So do you see what you’re doing as trying to reset the philosophers so they work on useful issues and stay within the bounds of common sense?
GB: Yes Richard. Though it seems the general opinion of the world that the end of speculation be practice, or the improvement and regulation of our lives and actions, yet those who are most addicted to speculative studies seem as generally of another mind. Philosophers are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arise skepticism and paradoxes. I
t is not enough that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing: its true nature, its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our faculties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives in doubting those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at and despise.
3:16: So you’re out to help philosophers avoid wasting their time and sticking to useful thinking?
GB: Yes Richard. In order to divert the busy mind of man from vain researches it seemed necessary to inquire into the source of its perplexities; and, if possible, to lay down such principles as, by an easy solution of them, together with their own native evidence, may at once recommend themselves for genuine to the mind, and rescue it from those endless pursuits it is engaged in.
[...] 3:16: In a way then, despite the initial weirdness of your ideas, you’re a common sense philosopher?
GB: Yes, I’m eternally banishing metaphysics and such like and recalling men to common sense. There are men who say there are insensible extensions. There are others who say the wall is not white, the fire is not hot, etc. We Irishmen cannot attain to these truths.
3:16: You say the true way of regarding the world we see and touch is to regard it as consisting of ideas or phenomena that are presented to human senses, somehow regularly ordered, and the occasions of pleasure or pain to us as we conform to or rebel against their natural order. Does this mean you don’t think there are things in themselves, independent of minds?
GB: Well Richard, I don’t know what is meant by things considered in themselves, that is, in abstraction. This is nonsense. ‘Thing’ and ‘idea’ are words of much about the same extent and meaning. Existence is not conceivable without perception and volition. I only declare the meaning of the word ‘existence’, as far as I can comprehend it. Pure intellect I understand not at all. It’s impossible anything besides that which thinks and is thought on should exist... (MORE - missing details, the interview)