Berkeley’s Suitcase

Nowadays, when you've been traveling without finesse, it will be familiar to you to try to fit all possible needs into a very small bag. Sometimes it becomes something that makes the process of blocking suitcases frustrating; an article that has a strange shape and is not full of other needs. It is important to identify the problem object. And if you can find that matter and you don't need it, wouldn't it be a little victory?

Young and unpublished Berkeley, similarly in the metaphysical field, breathed his own private philosophical diary with a breath: People bite. No need to be a wizard to see this. (Notes, George Berkeley's Works, Bishop of Cloyn, A. A. Luce, T. E. Jessop, n.279) Berkeley was trying to obey a number of beliefs and realized that he could not. Then, in an insight, he saw a belief that it made it harder and he could do without it.

The problem lay in belief in spiritual ideas, belief in atoms, trust in common sense and belief in matter through perception. Berkeley suddenly realized that he didn't need faith and when he got away with it, he could match the others.

Dive in Dangerous Waters of Ideas

Let's start with an abstraction derived from the unity of belief and faith in ideas.

Thomas Reid (1710-96), who looked back to early modern philosophy (ie from the beginning of the seventeenth century), observed that his predecessors followed the Early path of ideas. This observation was absolutely true. The reason for this is that early modern philosophers do not see a way for material bodies to exist in spiritual minds: how can a material tree be in a person's mind? Instead, it should be an intermediate entity, an idea. Ideas combine the material world of bodies with the concrete plane of minds, because ideas represent bodies, but they exist in minds. The interaction between the person's sensory organs and the tree leads to an idea that has the characteristics that represent the tree that allows the person to perceive the tree.

Of course, there was a great disagreement about how ideas should be understood. Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) thought ideas were the quality of perception. Berkeley found this view unreasonable. According to him, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and John Locke (1632-1704) understood better what ideas were needed in their work. Both received ideas as non-perceptual actions. Berkeley completely agreed: No matter what we think, it can't be a material tree, it doesn't explain anything in our mind that says it's a reflection of the action of tree perception. Rather, ideas (a) should be such things that we can keep in mind and (b) tell us about the features we associate with the tree.

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But now note how this view separates us from the sensor. Take colors, for example. Since the early period, the idea that colors are not present in objects is common. Instead, colors are the result of the interaction between the surface properties of the bodies and the sense organs: and the same applies to odor, taste and sounds. As Galileo wrote in 1623, odors, colors, etc. I think are more than just names in terms of the objects we associate, and they are only conscious. Therefore, if there were no living beings, all these qualities would be erased and disappeared (The Assayer, p.274). If we follow the path of ideas, colors and other senses are attributes of ideas, not of objects. The world of our experience is carnival for scents, flavors, sounds and colors, but we carry it in our minds with a quiet, dark and unpleasant reality. That's what I mean when I tell him how to isolate the sensor.

Moreover, the isolated form of this humanity invites the skeptic to ask: How can you be sure that not all the features of ideas are similar to colors, perhaps they are in their minds? How can you be sure that it is a material world? At this point, the skeptical Pierre Bayle at the Historique and Eritique (1697), the philosophical Dictionaire, stated that the path of ideas led to a more skeptical (skeptical) challenge that was known in ancient times.