George Berkeley

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George Berkeley
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Berkeleys Thesis

• Whatever is immediately perceived is an idea
  and can any idea exist out of the mind?

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Immaterialism

• All that exists are finite minds or spirits
  (such as ourselves), our ideas or perceptions and
  sensations, and an infinite spirit (God). There
  is no purely material reality.

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False Principles of Knowledge

• Berkeley thought that those difficulties which
  have blocked up the way to knowledge are due to
  the adoption of certain false principles of
  knowledge rather than to other limitations.

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The Problem of Abstract Ideas

• It is a mistake to think that because a
  scientific theory works it is an expression of
  the ultimate structure of reality and a way of
  attaining final truth.

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Essence is Perception

• I can no more doubt of what I perceive than I do
  of my own being.

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Direct Perception

• What he has done, he explains, is combine the
  philosophical belief that the things immediately
  perceived, are ideas which exist only in the mind
  with the common-sense belief that those things we
  immediately perceive are the real things. These
  two things put together, do in effect constitute
  the substance of what I advance.

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Trinity College, Dublin

• The steadiness, order, and regularity of the way
  in which our ideas are produced shows this spirit
  to be a bountiful, benevolent, wise, and powerful
  God.

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Quantum Theory

• Is light a particle or a wave? Some are saying
  that it is in the type of experiment that is set
  up, which is just another way of saying that it
  is our perception that makes it so.