What great contributions did George Berkeley make to affect 18th and 19th century philosophy?

Hey everyone!! I have been reading on this guy for hours now, and maybe I am just to spacy now to comprehend things but I thought I would shoot the question out there to see what everyone else thought :) Our teacher is all for us asking questions and finding out other peoples opinions as much as possiable!! In fact she was the one that suggested this site!! Thanks ;)~





Well see here is the thing, I have read alot of stuff so far, the wikipedia, my text beek and a few other sources. I have never taken philosophy -- I see that this will be the last philosophy class I take as I suck at this stuff!! hehehe, but I can't seem to grasp what exactly this guy did to make him so flippen' awesome!! What was Berekely's great contributions? I don't seem to get it ;)~|||Give me an old 'realist" like Aristotle any time.. Don't cloud your mind with people like the good bishop or really "silly" ones like Hume who led to the idiocy of "positivism"|||George Berkeley was one of the three most famous eighteenth century British Empiricists (see LOCKE, JOHN and HUME, DAVID). He is best known for his motto, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. He was an idealist: everything that exists is either a mind or depends for its existence upon a mind. He was an immaterialist: matter does not exist. He accepted the seemingly outrageous position that ordinary physical objects are composed solely of ideas, which are inherently mental. He wrote on vision, mathematics, Newtonian mechanics, economics, and medicine as well as philosophy.





According to Berkeley, the world consists of nothing but minds and ideas. Ordinary objects are collections of ideas. Already in his discussion of vision, he argued that one learns to coordinate ideas of sight and touch to judge distance, magnitude, and figure, properties which are immediately perceived only by touch. The ideas of one sense become signs of ideas of the other senses. In his philosophical writings, this coordination of regularly occurring ideas becomes the way the world is known and the way humans construct real things. If there are only minds and ideas, there is no place for some scientific constructs. Newtonian absolute space and time disappear. Time becomes nothing but the succession of ideas in individual minds (PHK 搂98). Motion is entirely object-relative (PHK 搂搂112-117). Science becomes nothing more than a system of natural signs. With the banishing of abstraction, mathematics is reduced to a system of signs in which words or numerals signify other words or numerals (PHK 搂122). Space is reduced to sensible extension, and since one cannot actually divide a piece of extension into an infinite number of sensible parts, various geometrical paradoxes dissolve. As Berkeley understands them, science and Christian theology become compatible.