Berkeley, George

Berkeley, George

(b. County Kilkenny, Ireland, March 1685; d Oxford, England, 14 January 1753)

philosophy of science.

Berkeley was a critic of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophical, scientific, mathematical, moral, political, and theological, ideas and an important link in the development of general philosophy between the period of Descartes and Locke and that of Hume and Kant. From his earliest days at Trinity College, Dublin (1700–1713), he came under the influence of Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Locke, and Malebranche. In 1705 he helped to found a society with the aim of pursuing the inquiry into their “new philosophy”; the extent of this inquiry may be gauged from Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, kept during the first few years of that period. Subsequently, particularly in London. Berkeley formed intellectual associations with such prominent figures as Clarke. Swift, Addison, Steele, and Pope. After a brief interlude in America, connected with his abortive attempt to found a college in Bermuda (1729–1731), he retired to the bishopric of Cloyne in 1734. He moved to Oxford in 1752.

Berkeley’s interests (excluding political economy, and his epistemological and theological inquiries except insofar as they bear on science) ranged from those with a primarily scientific focus to the scientifico-philosophical. In the former category belongs A New Theory of Vision (1709), reckoned by Brett’s History of Psychology to have been “the most significant contribution to psychology produced in the eighteenth century,” being “the first instance of clear isolation and purely relevant discussion, of a psychological topic” (Peters ed., p. 409). The main problem examined in this work is the factors that determine our ability to see things at a distance, the assumption being that the sense of vision itself is incapable of doing so. Rather, seeing distant objects requires the suggestions supplied by other senses, especially that of touch, as well as such other experiences as visual distortion caused by failure of eye accommodation. We do not “judge” by means of quasi-optica1 calculation of the distance of objects (the traditional account of Berkeley’s predecessors); rather, we let one group of sensations suggest another, in virtue of experience and custom. Moreover, from saying that all visual sensations “seem to be in the eye,” Berkeley moves to his basic contention, later generalized in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), that visual ideas are in our minds. Given his general doctrine that the “being” of things amounts to their being perceived, i.e., being ideas in a mind (the ultimate reference is to the divine mind), he infers that external space is not basic, but is “only suggested” to us by visual ideas, via tactile and other ideas.

This close interweaving of science with epistemology, as well as of metaphysics with theology, is also very prominent in Berkeley’s last major work, Siris (1744), which begins as an investigation of the medicinal virtues of tar water and ends with a disquisition on Platonic philosophy. The body of the book consists, on the one hand, of a discussion of contemporary chemical theory and, on the other, of a critique of Newtonian principles of explanation, of space and time, and of the true interpretation of the concept of causation. The sections on chemistry are of particular interest, for they display considerable acquaintance with most of the major chemical doctrines of Berkeley’s period (e.g. Boerhaave, Homberg, Hales. The younger Lemery, etc.), including a discussion of acids, salts, alkalies, and air that leads to a discussion of fire and light, the latter providing a “bridge” to a spiritual interpretation of all phenomena. Siris thus involves an attempt to assimilate Newtonian concepts to the more complex phenomena of chemistry and animal physiology.

Apart from his more specifically scientific preoccupations, Berkeley Berkeley’s more general aim in these writings is to show that the goal of science can be no more than describing phenomena through the laws and theories (“hypotheses”) of science that govern them, and thus to trace the “grammar” or “language of nature” without intervening concepts, at least in so far as these concepts might be construed existentially or as sources of “active power,” which in Berkeley’s terminology would amount to giving an “explanation.” The opposition to a positive construction of such intervening concepts is paramount in Berkeley’s writing on mathematics, as exemplified in his critique of the foundations of the differential calculus, whether our concern be with Newtonian “fluxions” or with Leibnizian “infinitesimals.” Both, as Berkeley points out in The Analyst (1734), suffer from the fatal defect of demanding that certain “increments” vanish in a result whose demonstration requires these increments to have a finite value.

Berkeley’s basic objection is to a sequence that is imagined to continue indefinitely, yet at the same time is conceived as suddenly ending. This difficulty formed the starting point of many discussions of the foundations of mathematics that continued in England until the nineteenth century, and he himself initially participated in them through replies to objections made to The Analyst. Berkeley does not impugn the employment of the differential calculus for “practical” purposes; his objection is to the quasi-existential positing of the “differential” entities involved. In the Principles this had been stated as an opposition to “abstract ideas.” His fundamental thought (although he lacks the notion of the limit) is “operationalist,” a concentration on the imaginative process of dividing a finite line into finite parts indefinitely, by always, letting the new parts “grow” so that they remain finite lines; this conception is meant to replace “infinite divisibility” into the “infinitely small” (Principles, sec. 128). At a more technical level Berkeley developed an ingenious theory of compensating errors that was meant to explain the “correct” results of the calculus of fluxions, whose “faulty” foundations alone he deplored.

Berkeley’s opposition to abstract ideas is closely connected with a theory of meaning the most relevant component of which is the contention that we should not suppose that to every noun there corresponds a particular idea. In De motu this is applied with special emphasis to the Newtonian concepts of gravitational attraction, action and reaction, and motion in general. Basically, Berkeley regards all such concepts as elements in “mathematical hypotheses” (i.e., what would now be called theoretical terms implicitly defined by certain theoretical axioms). Sometimes he holds that theoretical concepts are simply reducible to individual laws of phenomena (reductionism); at other times he emphasizes their place in the systematic constructions of these laws in overarching theories (a forerunner of the modern instrumentalist position).

The instrumentalist approach affected Berkeley’s theory of explanation and causation, which also drew upon the basic doctrine that all phenomena must be construed as ideas. Since they stand in an accusative relation to a perceiver, the ideas are held to be inactive; this is the doctrine of essepercipi. The logical counter part of the doctrine that no idea can act on any other idea is that no necessary connections exist between any such ideas. As a result, causal explanation cannot be reducible to the “action” of any phenomenalagents, be they “attraction” or “insensible corpuscles.” Causal action reduces to uniform “law-like” association between ideas that function as signs for things signified; the logical center of gravity being again the theoretical system of scientific laws, laws whose ultimate inductive foundation Berkeley places in the uniform operation of the “Author of nature” (Principles, sec. 107).

It follows that the doctrine of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, so central to the thinking of the “Newtonian century/’ in Berkeley loses its metaphysical relevance, reducing at most to no more than a difference of degree, since the opposition to abstract general ideas and the unavailability of the theoretical “corpuscles” for explanation rendered the conception unimportant. Berkeley does not so much deny unobservable entities; once again he is opposed only to treating them as genuine sources of transeunt causal action, since they are in reality no more than abstractions.

These approaches more or less naturally lead to Berkeley’s critique of the Newtonian concepts of absolute space, time, and motion. For it follows at once that all motion must be relative and referred to a physical (phenomenal) system, a contention that Berkeley also urges against Newton’s example of rotatory motion, thus anticipating part of what is now called Mach’s principle. The impossibility of absolute motion is one of Berkeley’s arguments against absolute space; another is its being an abstract idea. Moreover, it is otiose if taken to be an entity “existing without the mind” (Principles, sec. 116). This (somewhat weakly) seems to fit in with the conclusion drawn from the theory that distance and space cannot be determined visually. At best, empty space denotes a mere “possibility” for a body to be in motion, and certainly it is nothing “given in itself,” separate from or prior to body.

Berkeley’s general influence extended to such writers as Hume, Maclaurin, and Kant in the eighteenth century, and Mill, Helmholtz, and Mach in the nineteenth. He also anticipated many of the ideas of twentieth-century philosophers of science.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The standard edition of Berkeley’s writings is The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, eds., 9 vols. (Edinburgh, 1948–1957).

Berkeley’s major writings on science and mathematics and their philosophy are An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709); A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. 1 (Dublin, 1710), the only part published; Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713); De motu (London, 1721); Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (London, 1732); Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, Vindicated and Explained (London, 1733); The Analyst (London, 1734); A Defence of Free-Thinking in Mathematics (London, 1735); Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (London, 1744); Further Thoughts on Tat- Water (London, 1752); and Philosophical Commentaries [Commonplace Book ], A. A. Luce, ed. (London, 1944).

Collections that include scientific writings are Selections From Berkeley Annotated, A. C. Fraser, ed. (Oxford, 1874); Berkeley: Philosophical Writings, T. E. Jessop, ed. (Edinburgh, 1952); Berkeley: Works on Vision, C. M. Turbayne, ed., in Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis, 1963); and Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings, D. M. Armstrong, ed., in Collier Classics in the History of Thought (New York, 1965).

II. Secondary Literature. The standard biography is A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley (Edinburgh, 1949).

Discussions of aspects of Berkeley’s philosophy of science and mathematics since 1842 may be found in the following works: T. K. Abbott, Sight and Touch: An Attempt to Disprove the Received (or Berkeleian ) Theory of Vision (London, 1864); G. W. Ardley, Berkeley’s philosophy of Nature (Auckland, 1962); D. M. Armstrong, Berkeley’s Theory of Vision (Melbourne, 1960); S. Bailey, A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision (London, 1842); C. B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus (New York, 1959), ch. 6, pp. 224–229; Brett’s History of Psychology, R. S. Peters, ed. (London, 1953), pp. 408–414; British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 4 (May 1953), which honors the bicentenary of Berkeley’s death; G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The Classical Origins; Descartes to Kant (Oxford, 1969), ch. 5; F. Cajori. A History of the Conceptions of Limits and Fluxions in Great Britain From Newton to Woodhouse (Chicago, 1919), pp. 57–95; D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception. A History of the Philosophy of Perception (London, 1961), pp. 104–116: T. H, Huxley, Hume; With Helps to the Study of Berkeley (London, 1894); G. A. Johnston. The Development of Berkeley’s Philosophy (London, 1923); A. A. Luce. Berkeley and Malebranche (Oxford, 1934); J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, IV (London, 1875), 154–187; A. D. Ritchie, George Berkeley. A Reappraisal (Manchester, 1967): G. Stammler, Berkeleys Philosophie der Mathematik (Berlin, 1922); C. M. Turbaync, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962): and G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (London, 1953).

Gerd Buchdahl