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Meera Seth's picture

Bishop Berkeley says . . .

Eighteenth-century empiricist philosopher George Berkeley made famous the line "to be is to be perceived."

This is to say that, in the vein of pure immaterialist and idealist philosophy, there are no mind-independent objects or material in our understanding of the world and reality. The only two things that we can conceive of are minds and ideas. Moreover, ideas exist only insofar as they are perceived by some mind. Berkeley goes further to inquire, "Are ideas under control of the will?" If an idea is not under control of the will, then this idea is one of sense. On the contrary, if an idea is in fact under control of the will, then this idea is one of imagination.

So, while Berkeley would certainly agree with the premise that if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to witness such an occurrence, the tree does not make a sound, this account would not be sufficient. He would go so far as to say that not only does the tree not make a sound, but also that there is no tree to begin with.

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