George Berkeley

To come to an understanding of the relationship between Mr. Berkeley and the sample of Ananas comosus that we have placed for him on his desk, we may begin with what might appear to be a straw-philosopher argument. But, in making a nod to Rene Descartes and his Meditations we shall create a firmer basis for analyzing Berkeley's understanding of understanding. Descartes created a foundation in his own work on the nature of knowledge and the dueling powers of human certainty and doubt to which Berkeley - who was born in 1685, 35 years after Descartes's death - would build. Berkeley's work must be seen as in some measure a response, or a rejoinder, to the work that Descartes had done, for no philosopher writing within at least the century after Descartes's death on the relationship between reality, human experience and human perception could fail to engage the ideas of Descartes - or at leas

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o be sensible of and to understanding the way in which his mind function proves the objective existence of that mind and indeed of all of the rest of the physical world. This chain of argumentation is known as the ontological argument, and Berkeley rejects it out of hand. Descartes believes that it is possible to know about external world purely on the basis of the internal workings of the mind. Thus Descartes, looking down at his own pineapple, would argue that our experience of the pineapple's taste and texture and scent - coupled with his ontological proof of the reality of the world - is sufficient for us to understand, appreciate, and know how a pineapple tastes. Berkeley, watching Descartes roll the heavy, awkward fruit around the perimeter of his Cartesian Circle, would argue that Descartes (and in large measure John Locke) is confusing and confounding ideas and facts. Locke, for example, argued that all information about objective reality enters human consciousness through the senses, and from our sense organs is limned upon the tabulae rasae of our minds. The very blankness of those minds, countered against the highly organized state of our thoughts, means that ideas already exist in organized form. Thus Locke would sid
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Approximate Word count = 1298
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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