George Berkeley Essay -- Irish philosopher philosophy

George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher. His philosophical beliefs were centered on one main belief, the belief that perception is the basis for existence. In doing so, he rejected the notion of a material world in favor of an immaterial world. Berkeley felt that all we really know about an object we learn from our perception of that object. He recognized that in the materialist’s view the real object is independent of any perceiver’s perception. The pen on my desk would exist, whether or not I was in the room to see it or have a sensory experience of it in some way. Berkeley rejected this idea. He realized that knowledge is limited to perception. In this realization, he postulated that everything we know we learned through some sort of sensory perception. He demonstrated that there was a veil of ignorance separating the materialist’s real object and the perceived object. For instance, if one could not ever perceive the pen, how could one ever know of its existence? He held that if an object is independent of one’s perception, then how could one know it to be real. He thought that you could not truly know something without first perceiving it in some way. It was an easy step from that ideology for him to adopt the phrase – Esse Est Percipi, which means, â€Å"To be is to be perceived.'; There is a crippling problem that arises in this mode of thinking that can best be demonstrated by the following limerick: There once was a young man, who sa...