Wisdom Tonye Gibson

Berkeley's Empiricism and the Concept of God: A Defence Of Theism

George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop, occupies a singular and philosophically productive position within the empiricist tradition. Where Locke retained a mind-independent material substratum beneath sensible qualities and Hume systematically dissolved the metaphysical commitments of empiricism into scepticism, Berkeley developed a radical but internally disciplined alternative: the doctrine of immaterialism, or subjective idealism, according to which the existence of sensible things consists entirely in their being perceived. This paper argues that this doctrine is not incidentally but structurally …