Talk:George Berkeley

The university now called University of California, Berkeley was created (and named) before the city Berkeley; in fact, the presence of the university was originally the only reason for the existence of the town. I rewrote the "The city of Berkeley, California was named after him..." sentence to match this. —jtoomim

I'm somewhat confused here. The University of California was founded next to Oakland, California, and they named the town it was founded in (which did not really exist as much of a town for quite awhile) after Bishop Berkeley. However that location (much) later became only one site in a larger UC system, and hence became named University of California, Berkeley, while University of California now refers to the entire system. Which is to say, I think the current formulation is a little off but I'm not sure of a graceful way to correct it -- the city is named after him, the University is now named after the city, even though the University created the city. Which confuses me just to think about it, so maybe it is fine the way it is... --Fastfission 22:48, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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Hmm. Possible copyright violation from http://www.georgeberkeley.org/. See the "picture text" which appears to be a cut-and-paste from the web site.

OK, with the picture link removed, this pages passes the Google test. Copyright panic over.

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Wouldn't it be that case that a painting of the man would be in the public domain, and hence any picture of such a painting would also be in the public domain? INALBIPOOTI and I can't see that there would be any problem in copying and using the picture at http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/Berkeley/ for example

hawthorn

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Am I right in thinking he was a bishop? Shouldn't we mention this somewhere? (If he is that Bishop Berkeley, Boswell reports that when he admired Berkeley's "irrefutable" proof of the non-existence of matter, Samuel Johnson cried "I refute it thus!" and kicked a nearby rock very hard...)

He was a bishop. Unfortunately, the article seems to be almost entirely a desription of his philosophical ideas, and has very little about his life. I think it would be better to have a whole separate article about his philosophical ideas, and have the main article as a more biographical one, with brief summaries of his philosophical ideas as and when they crop up in his life. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the man to do this myself, so I'm not really being very helpful here! I might do some research later... maybe... -- Oliver P. 11:51 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think we should split the page, unless there's a recognized name for his theory of the nonexistence of matter, in which case we could have a page on that. A single page can easily contain biography and ideas: Immanuel Kant for instance. We do need more biographical information, though. Maybe I'll do some research too... maybe... Mswake 12:15 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

Okay, fair enough. I suppose there's no point in having a separate page on his ideas if they don't fit into some specifically named theory, so I hereby retract my proposal to split the page up! -- Oliver P. 12:21 Feb 3, 2003 (UTC)

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Move to talk page from article by Evercat:

Discussion (to be rendered into tighter prose?):

You see a redwood tree. Ha! It's only there while you're looking at it. It was only an image in the mind of God, which the Almighty let you hallucinate on.

In response to the old riddle, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one heard it, did it make a sound?," Berkeley would reply that if no one were there, the tree wouldn't be there.

This is eerily similar to recent theoretical physics notion that mass does not exist.

As Bob Dylan sang about dreams, "It's all in your head."

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Moved to talk page from article:

This is the essence and starting point of Berkeley's basic philosophy. Unfortunately, this doctrine is completely ignored by virtually all scholars today since there is not one who actually takes Berkeley seriously in the sense of approving of his precise philosophical principles as forming a legitimate method for pursuing scientific knowledge.

Yet without a firm grasp of these principles, it is impossible to render an accurate account of Berkeley's ideas or successfully apply them in any scientific enterprise.

I don't think this should be considered neutral or could be verified. Without further explanation it isn't very relevant either. DrZ 20:43 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Religion and mathematics

"Berkeley's intention seems to have been to defend religion by showing that the foundations of natural philosophy were equally weak"

There was certainly a relationship between BB's writings on the calculus and his views of religion, but this statement makes a hash of it. He thought the foundations of Christianity much stronger than those of Newtonian science, not "equal" to them in any way. I'll rewrite this passage. --Christofurio 18:35, May 8, 2004 (UTC)

Book ref

An anon recently added this book ref into the lead para

Study Guide: http://www.geocities.com/berkeley_principles

This looks like a Penguin study guide to the Principles and Three Dialogues, however it would be better in a 'further reading' section. Unfortunately I couldn't find the ISBN number to reference it properly. - Solipsist 08:07, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Contributions to Philosophy

(A side note, I think much of this section is completely incorrect.) -- User:165.123.152.192 23:25, 3 Apr 2005