Form of idealism represented primarily by George Berkeley (1685-1753), though his own name for it was immaterialism.
Berkeley distinguished minds or spirits (including both God and finite spirits like us), which are active, from ideas which are their contents and are passive. To be is to perceive, in the case of spirits, or to be perceived, in the case of ideas; ‘perceive’ here really means ‘have as content’, and ‘be perceived’ means ‘be had as content’.
Berkeley was mainly concerned to reject the notion of matter, which he regarded as unknowable and the source of paradoxes, and itself stemming from the doctrine of ‘abstract ideas’, which he made his first target.
The term ‘subjective idealism’, used of Berkeley and also of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) (see transcendental idealism) by objective idealists, perhaps depends on emphasizing only one side of Berkeley’s view, that to be is to be perceived; and in the case of Kant, his treatment of ideas as dependent on our minds.
Source:
G Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
Table of Contents
- 1 Videos
- 2 Related Products
- 2.1 Subjective Idealism: A Dialogue Between A Philosopher And A Skeptic
- 2.2 The True Nature of YOUR Existence: Existence is composed not of physical matter, but subjective experience
- 2.3 Subjective Idealism
- 2.4 THE NEO-HEGELIAN SELF AND SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM
- 2.5 Objective Realism vs Subjective Idealism (Original)
- 2.6 Subjective Idealism. An original article from The Month magazine, 1904.
- 2.7 Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory)
- 2.8 The new public philosophy. 2. Materialism articles: opposition subjective idealism(Chinese Edition)
- 2.9 Marxism and Subjectivity (Research on Subjective Idealism of Hufeng in Anti-Japanese War) (Chinese Edition)
- 2.10 Meaning in Absurdity: What bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality
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