George Berkeley, 3 Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous

George Berkeley, 3 Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous

Author: George Berkeley

Year: 1910

H aving surveyed the philosophical landscape at the dawn of the 18th century, George Berkeley (1685–1753) concluded that philosophers had become trapped in a maze of their own making. He believed that philosophers entered the maze by making a certain fundamental assumption —namely, that matter exists. The leading metaphysical systems of his day, including those of René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632– 1704), described the physical world as a realm of objects or bodies composed of minute, insensible corpuscles of matter that exist independently of the human mind and are endowed only with scientific properties such as extension, mass, and mobility. According to this general worldview, which Berkeley referred to as ‘materialism’, the physical world as it really is exists independent of, and is radically different than, the physical world as it appears to our senses. According to materialism, a physical object, such as a teacup, is constituted of corpuscles of matter, which themselves have no color, odor, taste, or temperature. But a teacup certainly appears to have color on its surface, and the tea inside of it certainly appears to have a color, odor, taste, and temperature