Berkeley on Immaterialism
The following is an essay I wrote for my British Empiricism class. In order to understand Berkeley’s argument that sensible objects cannot exist unperceived, we first need to understand his ontology and how he understands “existence”. The objects of our knowledge, begins Berkeley, are either impressed upon the senses, or by perception of the passions or mind, or by memory and imagination. All these objects, no matter which mode they come by, will only be known to us by some kind of property, such as it is red, soft, and heavy. That is all that is known to us, and what is not known to us is the thing in themselves. When I describe my heavy red blanket, all I am really describing are my bundled perceptions of the thing, but there is a gap between my perceptions of the thing and the thing itself. So all I really have access to are perceptions. However, if there are no perceptions of a thing, then it cannot be said to exist. For Berkeley, to speak of something unperceived as exis...