George Berkeley

George Berkeley, known as Bishop Berkeley, lived from 12 March 1685 to 14 January 1753 and was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer and clergyman regarded as the founder of immaterialism, a theory later known as subjective idealism; the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called him the father of idealism, and he played a leading role in the empiricism movement, ranking among the most cited philosophers of eighteenth century Europe with deep influence on later thinkers including Immanuel Kant and David Hume. In 1709 he published An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, arguing that the proper objects of sight are not material objects but light and colour, foreshadowing his best known work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge of 1710, which after a poor reception he rewrote in dialogue form as Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in 1713, with Philonous representing Berkeley's own views against Hylas, who embodies his opponents, particularly John Locke. He argued against Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu, published in 1721, in arguments that were a notable precursor to those of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein, published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free thinkers, in 1732, and The Analyst, a critique of the foundations of calculus that influenced the development of mathematics, in 1734; his immaterialism denies the existence of material substance, holding that familiar objects like tables and chairs are ideas perceived by the mind that cannot exist unperceived, and he is also known for his critique of abstraction. He died in Oxford in 1753, and interest in his ideas increased greatly after World War II because they anticipated many issues of twentieth century philosophy such as the problem of perception, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and the importance of language; public interest in the United States rose sharply in the early nineteenth century, leading the University of California, Berkeley, the city of Berkeley, California, and Berkeley College at Yale to all be named after him.