- Lived:
- 1685–1753 · Kilkenny, Dublin, London, Rhode Island, Cloyne, Oxford
- Tradition:
- Irish idealism at the heart of British empiricism — the boldest move in the "way of ideas"
- The Big Idea:
- The physical world is not made of mind-independent matter; it is made of perceptions and the minds that have them — to be is to be perceived — and it stays real and stable because God never stops perceiving it.
- In their words:
- "All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind."
- If you remember one thing:
- The claim "matter does not exist" sounds like madness, was laughed at for a century, and has never been cleanly refuted — Hume called Berkeley's arguments the best lessons of skepticism ever written.