ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a long view with a particular problem in mind, and presents a detailed examination of George Berkeley’s philosophy. If the French reviewer and Dr. Johnson represent one extreme response to Berkeley, simply asserting that he denies corporeality and affronts common sense, there are those who take the other extreme and basically reaffirm the judgement Hylas makes at the end of the Dialogues. Berkeley, however, had no doubt at all that John Locke’s way of looking at the world was potentially disastrous, and he believed that the mistakes in it were rooted in the account of what it is to perceive a physical object. Berkeley is largely responsible for the notion that the primary/secondary quality distinction must fall together with representationalism. Berkeley was fully aware of the sceptical tendency implicit in the Cartesian as in the empiricist approach to philosophy, as well as in the thinking of the scientists.
