@philosophyminis: When people wonder what a #philosopher does all day, they often imagine a person sitting in a room asking these big and ridiculous questions. And one of the most common of these is the age-old fortune cookie favourite of ‘If a tree falls down in the forest and there's no one around, does it make a sound?’ And according to George Berkeley, the answer is no. #Berkeley was a ‘strong empiricist,’ which means he believed that everything we know must at one point have passed through our senses. You have to have experienced it before you can call it #knowledge . But this presents a problem. Because, how can we know that anything exists outside of our senses? You might say, ‘Look at that’ or ‘I can touch it and I can kick it,’ but that doesn't prove what philosophers call ‘objective matter.’ For example, your seeing a duck doesn't prove that there is a duck. All that you've proven is that you're having a perception of something that looks like a duck. Our knowledge is limited to that which we can experience, and we can never peek behind the sensory veil to check on what's really there. Berkeley has a further point to drill the point home, known as the ‘master argument,’ where he asks us to imagine this ‘unperceived matter’ which underpins the universe. But we can't. To imagine matter will always use a previous experience that we've once had. It might be a blob, or a cloud, or that picture of an #atom on the science room wall at your school. But that's not external matter. That's a previous sensation. For Berkeley, only two things exist: me, the perceiver, and that which I perceive. A tree in the forest will exist only in my mind or if I'm there to actually perceive it. #philosophy #epistemology #riddle #deepquestions

Jonny Thomson

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Tuesday 02 July 2024 12:50:41 GMT