The claim that objects depend on being perceived gives George Berkeley’s philosophy its most famous point of departure. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge argues that ordinary objects are collections of ideas perceived by minds, while Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous presents related arguments in a more conversational form. Berkeley’s famous principle esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived”—is only part of a broader philosophy involving God, language and scepticism. He also wrote on vision, economics and other subjects. The prose can be surprisingly clear for eighteenth-century philosophy, though the argument is conceptually demanding. The most useful shelf associations are empiricism, idealism, metaphysics and philosophy of perception alongside Locke and Hume. Read more Less
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