A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
Описание книги
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge George Berkeley – With the publication of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (hereinafter referred to as A Treatise), George Berkeley took the then astounding claim that the material world that we think is real, tangible, and visual was nothing of the sort. The vast majority of all human beings took the understandable position that what they could see, hear, touch, smell, and taste was so obviously undeniable that no sane person could think otherwise. George Berkeley, however, thought otherwise. His position was later adopted in the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, who furthered Berkeleys claim that an immaterial world existed on a plane beyond our own.Prior to Berkeleys novel view that the real world did not exist, it was the nearly universal acceptance of the thesis of his immediate predecessor, John Locke, that the entire universe was like a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking parts of matter composed of qualities inherent in all physical matterlength, breadth, width, weight, color, etc.that Locke called primary and those qualities that existed only in the minds of perceiving human beingscolor, taste, smell, etc.) that he termed secondary. Berkeley took the position that Lockes take on the universe was foolish, absurd, and full of what he saw as self-evident contradictions. If all that a believer of Locke was limited to were his own personal observations emanating from his physical senses, then how could he know anything of the external world when Locke even granted that ones belief in secondary qualities was provisional at best and unreliable at worst.Then there was Berkeleys contentious claim that those who believed in materialists like John Locke must inevitably doubt the existence of God. Berkeley insisted that if human beings could be wrong about the reality of objects in the external world due to the variability of the all too human tendency to be misled by the ever changing interpretations caused by secondary qualities, then it followed that universal skepticism could not be avoided. And skepticism of the natural world must lead to skepticism of the very belief in God. Berkeleys claim was that if the material world did not exist, then it was only ones ideas about the world that could give form and substance to this world. And an all-powerful and ubiquitous God was needed to do this. With Locke, God was only seen as the Original Watchmaker, who set the world in motion, and once having done so, departed the scene, leaving God as an absentee landlord who may or may not have any further need to intervene in human affairs. Berkeley was aghast at this possibility of Locke that excluded God from contact with human beings. Under his own theological interpretation, God was a vital component of the entirety of human existence. Thus, George Berkeley came to be seen as a visionary whose theories on immaterialism influenced later generations of philosophers.
Отрывок из книги
George Berkeley
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
.....
"Abstract ideas are not so obvious or easy to children or the yet unexercised mind as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so. For, when we nicely reflect upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and contrivances of the mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily offer themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle (which is yet none of the most abstract, comprehensive, and difficult); for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once? In effect, it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together. It is true the mind in this imperfect state has need of such ideas, and makes all the haste to them it can, for the conveniency of communication and enlargement of knowledge, to both which it is naturally very much inclined. But yet one has reason to suspect such ideas are marks of our imperfection. At least this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with, nor such as its earliest knowledge is conversant about."- If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an idea or no. And this, methinks, can be no hard task for anyone to perform. What more easy than for anyone to look a little into his own thoughts, and there try whether he has, or can attain to have, an idea that shall correspond with the description that is here given of the general idea of a triangle, which is "neither oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once?"
14 Much is here said of the difficulty that abstract ideas carry with them, and the pains and skill requisite to the forming them. And it is on all hands agreed that there is need of great toil and labour of the mind, to emancipate our thoughts from particular objects, and raise them to those sublime speculations that are conversant about abstract ideas. From all which the natural consequence should seem to be, that so difficult a thing as the forming abstract ideas was not necessary for communication, which is so easy and familiar to all sorts of men. But, we are told, if they seem obvious and easy to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so. Now, I would fain know at what time it is men are employed in surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely the great and multiplied labour of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds abstract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of?
.....