George Berkeley in the context of "Anglican"

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⭐ Core Definition: George Berkeley

George Berkeley (/ˈbɑːrkli/ BARK-lee; 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman who is regarded as the founder of "immaterialism", a philosophical theory he developed which later came to be known as subjective idealism. He has also been called "the father of idealism" by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Berkeley played a leading role in the empiricism movement and was one of its pioneers. He was among the most cited philosophers of 18th-century Europe, and his works deeply influenced later thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and colour. This foreshadowed his most well-known philosophical work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710, which, after its poor reception, he rewrote in dialogue form and published under the title Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in 1713. In this book, Berkeley's views were represented by Philonous (Greek: "lover of mind"), while Hylas ("hyle", Greek: "matter") embodies Berkeley's opponents, in particular John Locke.

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George Berkeley in the context of David Hume

David Hume (/hjuːm/; born David Home; 7 May 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist who is known for his highly influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism and metaphysical naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience; this places him amongst such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley.

Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but only experience the "constant conjunction" of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.

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George Berkeley in the context of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.

Book I of the Essay is Locke's attempt to refute the rationalist notion of innate ideas. Book II sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas—such as "red", "sweet", "round"—and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. He also offers a theory of personal identity, offering a largely psychological criterion. Book III is concerned with language, and Book IV with knowledge, including intuition, mathematics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), faith, and opinion.

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George Berkeley in the context of University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system.

Berkeley has an enrollment of more than 45,000 students. The university is organized around fifteen schools of study on the same campus, including the College of Chemistry, the College of Engineering, College of Letters and Science, and the Haas School of Business. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was originally founded as part of the university.

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George Berkeley in the context of Subjective idealism

Subjective idealism, or empirical idealism or immaterialism, is a form of philosophical monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Subjective idealism rejects dualism, neutral monism, and materialism; it is the contrary of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that all or some classes of mental phenomena (such as emotions, beliefs, or desires) do not exist, but are sheer illusions.

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George Berkeley in the context of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (commonly called the Principles of Human Knowledge, or simply the Treatise) is a 1710 work, in English, by Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley. This book largely seeks to refute the claims made by Berkeley's contemporary John Locke about the nature of human perception. Whilst, like all the Empiricist philosophers, both Locke and Berkeley agreed that we are having experiences, regardless of whether material objects exist, Berkeley sought to prove that the outside world (the world which causes the ideas one has within one's mind) is also composed solely of ideas. Berkeley did this by suggesting that "Ideas can only resemble Ideas" – the mental ideas that we possess can only resemble other ideas (not material objects) and thus the external world consists not of physical form, but rather of ideas. This world is (or, at least, was) given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley concludes is God.

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George Berkeley in the context of Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, or simply Three Dialogues, is a 1713 book on metaphysics and idealism written by George Berkeley. Taking the form of a dialogue, the book was written as a response to the criticism Berkeley experienced after publishing A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.

Three important concepts discussed in the Three Dialogues are perceptual relativity, the conceivability/master argument and Berkeley's phenomenalism. Perceptual relativity argues that the same object can appear to have different characteristics (e.g. shape) depending on the observer's perspective. Since objective features of objects cannot change without an inherent change in the object itself, shape must not be an objective feature.

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George Berkeley in the context of Radical constructivism

Radical constructivism is an approach to epistemology that situates knowledge in terms of knowers' experience. It looks to break with the conception of knowledge as a correspondence between a knower's understanding of their experience and the world beyond that experience. Adopting a skeptical position towards correspondence as in principle impossible to verify because one cannot access the world beyond one's experience in order to test the relation, radical constructivists look to redefine epistemology in terms of the viability of knowledge within knowers' experience. This break from the traditional framing of epistemology differentiates it from "trivial" forms of constructivism that emphasise the role of the knower in constructing knowledge while maintaining the traditional perspective of knowledge in terms of correspondence. Radical constructivism has been described as a "post-epistemological" position.

Radical constructivism was initially formulated by Ernst von Glasersfeld, who drew on the work of Jean Piaget, Giambattista Vico, and George Berkeley amongst others. Radical constructivism is closely related to second-order cybernetics, and especially the work of Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela. During the 1980s, Siegfried J. Schmidt played a leading role in establishing radical constructivism as a paradigm within the German speaking academic world.

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George Berkeley in the context of Libertarianism (metaphysics)

Metaphysical libertarianism is the philosophical view that free will exists, that it is incompatible with determinism, and therefore that determinism is false. In the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, libertarianism is one of the main positions related to the problems of free will and determinism. In particular, libertarianism is an incompatibilist position which argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe. Libertarianism states that since agents have free will, determinism must be false.

One of the first clear formulations of libertarianism is found in John Duns Scotus. In a theological context, metaphysical libertarianism was notably defended by Jesuit authors like Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez against the rather compatibilist Thomism of Domingo Báñez. Other important metaphysical libertarians in the early modern period were René Descartes, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Reid.

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