Thinker · Empiricists
Berkeley
1685 – 1753 · Empiricists · The rationalists & empiricists
An Anglican bishop who looked at the material world everyone took for granted and announced that it does not exist. Not that the world is unreal: the tree, the table, the apple are as real as ever. But there is no *matter* under them, no inert stuff propping up our perceptions, because to be is to be perceived. An apple just is its look and feel and smell and taste, and nothing underneath. The world is real, shared, and law-governed, and it is made entirely of minds and their ideas, held in being by the greatest mind of all. He took Locke's empiricism one step further than Locke dared, and the step landed somewhere nobody expected: a universe with the matter taken out and God left holding it up.
What changed
Before
Behind our perceptions lies a material world
After
There is no matter; to be is to be perceived
Inside the walk-through
The bishop who took common sense seriously
An apple is its look, feel, smell, and taste
Why there is no matter
Then where does the world go when no one is looking
The world is mental, not unreal
What Berkeley left to Hume