Part of the “Longman Library of Primary Sources in Philosophy,” this edition of Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous is framed by a pedagogical structure designed to make this important work of philosophy more accessible and meaningful for readers. A General Introduction includes biographical information on Berkeley, the work's historical context, and a discussion of historical influences, and a conclusion discusses how the work has influenced other philosophers and why it is important today. Annotations and notes from the editor clarify difficult passages for greater understanding. A bibliography gives the reader additional resources for further study.

Editor’s Introduction

Having surveyed the philosophical landscape at the dawn of the 18th century, George Berkeley (1685–1753) concluded that philosophers had become trapped in a maze of their own making. He believed that philosophers entered the maze by making a certain fundamental assumption—namely, that matter exists. The leading metaphysical systems of his day, including those of René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704), described the physical world as a realm of objects or bodies composed of minute, insensible corpuscles of matter that exist independently of the human mind and are endowed only with scientific properties such as extension, mass, and mobility. According to this general worldview, which Berkeley referred to as ‘materialism’, the physical world as it really is exists independent of, and is radically different than, the physical world as it appears to our senses. According to materialism, a physical object, such as a teacup, is constituted of corpuscles of matter, which themselves have no color, odor, taste, or temperature. But a teacup certainly appears to have color on its surface, and the tea inside of it certainly appears to have a color, odor, taste, and temperature. This, according to the materialist, is simply because the corpuscles of matter that make up the teacup and the tea have the ability to affect our senses in certain ways in virtue of their extension, mass, and motion.

Materialism had acquired the status of orthodoxy by the early 18th century. But Berkeley feared that materialism would encourage skepticism and atheism, and, in turn, immorality. He also believed that this “modern way of explaining things” gives rise to intractable—indeed, insolvable—problems in philosophy, science, mathematics, and theology. These problems, Berkeley thought, form the walls of a maze with no exit, and his fundamental philosophical project involved showing philosophers the way out of the maze by showing them how they had gotten into it in the first place. The only hope for philosophy, Berkeley believed, was to avoid entering the maze in the first place—to deny that matter exists.

Materialism had already been subjected to vigorous criticism by skeptical philosophers who argued that neither our senses nor reason provide sufficient justification for believing that matter exists. These skeptics concluded that we simply cannot know the true nature of the physical world, and, hence, we can only make guarded claims about how the world appears to be. One of the major preoccupations of the materialists in the 17th century, then, was combating this skepticism. Descartes and Locke invested considerable intellectual effort in constructing philosophical arguments to show that we have the capacity to know the material world for what it truly is. Though Berkeley believed that the materialists failed to meet the skeptics’ challenges, he was unwilling to resign himself to skepticism.

Berkeley realized that the materialists and skeptics shared a fundamental assumption—namely, that the real world is distinct from the world we immediately experience with our five senses. Because they shared this assumption, Berkeley saw the materialists and skeptics as being trapped in the same maze. But where the skeptics rightly recognized that the maze is inescapable, the materialists wrongly believed that there is a way out of the maze. Berkeley’s fundamental philosophical insight was that one can refuse to enter the maze in the first place—that is, one can deny that matter exists and, by doing so, deny that the real world is distinct from the world we directly perceive. By exposing these assumptions as false and even unintelligible, Berkeley intended to undermine materialism and skepticism at once. He aimed to show that we cannot even conceive of a material world existing independent of its being perceived, and, hence, the problems that arise from materialism, including the problem of skepticism, are not genuine philosophical problems at all. Rather, the materialists and skeptics were both struggling with what some recent philosophers have called “pseudo-problems”—problems that cannot be solved because the very concepts involved in formulating them are nonsensical. When it is recognized that materialism rests upon incoherent assumptions, the walls of the maze that grow up around it simply dissolve.

Berkeley’s analysis led him to develop a fantastic and revolutionary alternative to materialism. Central to his metaphysics is the claim that the whole of reality consists of the minds of spiritual beings and ideas in those minds. Berkeley referred to his view as ‘immaterialism’, by which he intended to convey that the fundamental constituents of reality are immaterial—that is, the minds of spiritual beings and the ideas in those minds are not composed of matter. Berkeley’s view is also frequently referred to as ‘idealism’, which is intended to convey his view that ordinary physical objects exist only as collections of ideas in the minds of spiritual beings who perceive them. His view has often been summarized in the Latin slogan ‘esse est percipi aut percipere’ (‘to be is to be perceived or to perceive’). For a physical object, such as a teacup, to be is to be perceived, which means that the teacup exists only insofar as its constituent ideas are perceived. But if there are ideas that are perceived, there must also be minds that perceive them, and, for a mind, to be is to perceive.

Stated without context, Berkeley’s worldview strikes many as absurd. It is perhaps all the more surprising to find that Berkeley styles himself as the defender of a “vulgar”—the term as Berkeley uses it means “ordinary” or “everyday” and does not have the pejorative connotation that it does today—conception of the world, and as an opponent to a convoluted, philosophical conception of the world. Where the philosophers believe that the real world is distinct from the world we immediately perceive, ordinary people believe that the real world just is the world that we directly or immediately perceive. Where the philosophers believe that the objects constituting the real world are distinct from the things that we sense, ordinary people believe that the very things that we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are the objects of the real world. Where the philosophers doubt their senses, ordinary people trust their senses. On all of these counts Berkeley sided with ordinary people in opposition to the philosophers. (The fact that Berkeley takes ‘philosophers’ to be synonymous with ‘materialists’ indicates the pervasiveness of the view he was attacking.) In his Preface to the Three Dialogues Berkeley says that after having been shown the way out of the “wild mazes of philosophy” (54) one feels the same sense of satisfaction and peace that one feels after returning home from a long and difficult journey. The end of Berkeley’s philosophical project then is not to provide us with some new knowledge about the world that we did not have before setting out on our inquiries. Rather, his goal is to vindicate what he takes to be our ordinary, everyday conception of the world, and to show that we can know all that there is to know about the real world, once we come to recognize that there is nothing more to the real world than what we directly experience with our five senses.

More so today than ever, we look to science for an account of the fundamental nature of the physical world. Scientific materialism is at least tacitly adopted by most people, and we have become accustomed to believing that the “real world” as described by scientists is in many respects very different from the world of everyday experience. Today we do not conceive the physical world in terms of corpuscles of matter, of course, but in terms of quarks, leptons, strings, and fields. Berkeley remains important and relevant today because he, perhaps more than any other modern philosopher, insists that we must be able to reconcile our scientific conception of the world with our everyday experience if that conception is to be intelligible to us.

The Three Dialogues is a concise and engaging introduction to Berkeley’s philosophy and to philosophy in general. It is also a literary gem. The work records three imaginary conversations that occur in the garden of an unnamed college on three successive days. The characters are Hylas—a materialist whose name derives from the Greek for “matter”— and Philonous—an idealist whose name derives from the Greek for “lover of mind” and who serves as Berkeley’s mouthpiece. Through the course of the Three Dialogues Philonous offers a sustained attack on Hylas’ materialism and an exposition and defense of immaterialism.