Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

George Berkeley was a prominent British empiricist (in addition to John Locke and David Hume) who later in life became an ordained Bishop of Cloyne (Ireland) in the Anglican Church. Berkeley was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College Dublin. While a fellow at Trinity College, Berkeley composed three significant works: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). Berkeley was a public intellectual and had made the acquaintance of other eminent thinkers and writers of the day including Richard Steel, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison.

Berkeley’s primary impetus for proposing the concept of idealism was to respond directly to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The dialogues between Philonous and Hylas are effectively an argument against this work, with Hylas acting as a stand-in for Locke. Berkeley ultimately believed that Locke’s arguments, specifically his theory of abstract ideas, created a well-spring for skepticism. This text is Berkeley’s first attempt at wrestling with and refuting Locke’s theory. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is a further attempt at both refuting Locke and providing what Berkeley believed was a more coherent view of how humans attain knowledge. In both texts, Berkeley posited that 1) matter does not exist outside a mind that perceives it (immaterialism) and 2) only ideas and spirits or minds truly exist in the world (idealism). These are the two fundamental philosophical premises on which Berkeley builds his argument as presented by Philonous in the Three Dialogues.

Berkeley was an empiricist, holding that knowledge could only be obtained through direct experience gained by the senses. As such, he was reacting to a growing movement during the Enlightenment toward rationalism, which elevated the value of reason, logic, and inference in addition to observational experience. Berkeley saw in this rationalism a movement toward skepticism and ultimately atheism. Three Dialogues is in part an attempt to offer logical proof that God exists. Despite his seemingly contrarian claim that matter exists only in the mind that perceives it, Berkeley saw himself as upholding the common view of the common people of the time, and he believed that rationalist philosophers were unnecessarily complicating what was common sense to the masses. In Three Dialogues, Berkeley (through Philonous) repeatedly mentions that he sides with the common view.

Berkeley is most famous today for the maxim esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived.” As an idealist, he believed that all the objects we perceive are only ideas whose existence depends on the sensory organs and the mind perceiving them. This view aligned with Berkeley’s Christian faith in that the coherence of the world depended on the presence of an omniscient God who could perceive all things at once. Without this God, objects would cease to exist as soon as no one was looking at them. For this reason, Berkeley saw his philosophy as an extension of his work as a clergyman.

Berkeley eventually began a more robust focus on Christian theology, and much of his later work was a defense of Christianity. After becoming Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley was well regarded even though he was an Anglican Bishop in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Ireland.