Berkeley philosopher biography

George Berkeley Berkeley received a priest in the city of Philosophy G. Bishop in the Klana of Ireland with G. his teaching called Immaterialism. According to Berkeley, what people take for things independent of consciousness, nothing more than a set of their sensations in the terminology of Berkeley - “ideas”. Its main formula read: "To be - it means to be in perception." Before him, the division of sensual qualities perceived by a person into primary - independent of consciousness, such as the hardness of objects, their impermeability, spatial forms, etc.

Berkeley resolutely rejected this distinction, arguing that no qualities except directly experienced by the subject. Accordingly, one should abandon the assumption of material external agents stimuli, the effects of which on the senses cause the sensations of “ideas” and other mental formations. Ideas are interconnected according to the laws of the association, forming complexes illusoryly mistaken for material physical objects.

Behind these complexes, their true reason is hidden, which, according to Berkeley, is not a material substance nature, but the spirit is a simple, indivisible active essence that thinks, has the will and perceives ideas that is, mental images. The provisions issued by science for the laws of nature are actually a continuous sequence of ideas. In those cases when it imagines that one idea causes another and scientific thought takes this connection for the causal, the usual way that God acts is hidden.

In our knowledge, the mind is passive. He only observes the change of phenomena, between which there is no necessary connection, but there is an arbitrary activity of God. Mental phenomena are not interconnected by causal, but symbolic iconic relationships. One serves as a sign of the other.

Fire when converging with it is not a cause of pain, but a sign warning about it. But in one sign we can warn others and this is enough to behave correctly. The psychology of perception of Berkeley devoted the treatise "Experience of the new theory of vision" G. In it, he used the principle of association to explain the perception of the visible space. Turning to the surface of the mesh membrane of the eye, you can understand how the image of two measurements of space arises - vertical and horizontal, but inexplicably perception of the depth, distance, which is defended by the visible by the subject.

This perception arises due to the fact that tactile sensations join the mesh image and arises, thanks to the Association, Berkeley called it “snowstorms”, a three -dimensional image. Therefore, this image is not innate. It develops thanks to experience. From the same positions, Berkeley analyzed other components of the process of building visual perception. The concept of Berkeley became the prototype of many subjective-idealistic directions in Western psychology, generating the entire Cantian line in philosophy.

The main works of Berkeley: “Experience of the new theory of vision” G. Yaroshevsky, L. Karpenko Source: History of Psychology in Persons. Under the general. Publications from the image-catalog of the NPB named after Ushinsky to view the card, click on the small image at the bottom of the publication from the electronic catalog of the NPB named after