Bishop Berkeley

By Edward Epsen in April 2016

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Runtime: 34 mins

Edward Epsen discusses George Berkeley, an early 18th-century philosopher, who is significant for his reaction to the Enlightenment, earning admiration from diverse thinkers like Coleridge, Schopenhauer, and Yeats. Yeats admired both Berkeley the visionary and Berkeley the pragmatic bishop, whose philosophy of immaterialism rejected metaphysical abstractions of matter. Educated in the Locke-influenced environment of Trinity College Dublin, Berkeley opposed the prevailing view of abstract matter, influenced by Descartes and Malebranche. He posited that the real world is the sensory world, directly experienced and organized by God. Berkeley’s work, including "Principles of Human Knowledge," significantly influenced later thinkers and institutions, including American philosopher Samuel Johnson and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Produced in 2016. Provisional captions.

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