Biography

Radical immaterialism

Item: George Berkeley
Author: Janna Thompson

The consolations of George Berkeley

by Janna Thompson •

July 2021, no. 433

George Berkeley: A philosophical life by Tom Jones

Princeton University Press, US$35 hb, 643 pp

Biography

Radical immaterialism

The consolations of George Berkeley

by Janna Thompson •

July 2021, no. 433

Bishop George Berkeley, painted by John Smibert (photograph via Google Art Project)

George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon.

Janna Thompson

Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. She is the author of Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (2002) and Intergenerational Justice: Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity (2009). She has also written articles on environmental philosophy, aesthetics, feminism, and global justice.