Berkeley's Way of Thinking

Are you an idealist, dualist, or a materialist?

Berkeley is no doubt an idealist, a person who believes only on the mind, there is no such thing as matter according to them!

Berkeley believes that ideas from the mind can come from the senses, remembering/manipulating, or combining ideas (you combine ideas to have an idea of a mermaid for example).

Lets say you have an apple in front of you, a dualist, you think that the apple consists of matter, and the idea of it comes from the mind, thus the mind and matter both exist independently. However Berkeley way of thinking goes like such: an apple for example is just a cluster of ideas of it being red, sweet, round...and thats all the apple is; a cluster of ideas you perceive. Thus he believes that an apple or anything for that matter (mountains, rivers,) would never exist without a mind to perceive those ideas.

Ultimately according to Berkeley ideas can only come from the mind, or god but never from matter itself.

Berkeley believes that the apple has secondary qualities like color and it also has primary qualities like shape, figure. He thinks the primary qualities of anything can only be known from the secondary qualities, thus both these types of qualities are mind dependent, and matter independent.

To wrap up, according to Berkeley no matter exists, only ideas that are perceived by the mind exist.

Myself I don't think i am in any type of agreement with Berkeley's way of thinking, it seems more logical and natural to believe in a type of dualist approach where there can be both material objects and the mind working independently.

Summary GE Moore proof of external world

Descartes tried, Kant even tried to prove the existence of an external world (things like a body with hands, tables, chairs etc...)... No doubts that they have given excellent proof of what they believe is sufficient in saying that an external world does in fact exist. However those proofs are hard to read and understand. Moore believed that these philosophers were too complex, and that there is a much simpler proof. He simply puts his hands in front of him (it could be anything, even a leg). He claims that "1)here is one hand, and here is another, 2) hands are external things. 3) thus external things exist". For Moore this is all it takes to prove the existence of an external world... in less than 1 sentence he believes he has given a better(easier) proof than Descartes in his meditations.

Now to assess the proof; it seems clear that the premises are different than the conclusions, it is also clear that the conclusions follows from his premises, but however is the premise "hands are external things" actually true???... Moore certainly thinks so, however he never even tried proving that he has hands, he thinks proving this is absurd, in order to do so he would have to prove that he is not dreaming, which he knows he cant, he isn't even going to try.

He tries to counter attack skeptical philosophers who argued that how can one be sure if you are not currently dreaming in which you have hands. Moore simply replies by saying that he knows hes standing up, so he knows hes not dreaming, furthermore he thinks if that if you don't know that you are dreaming, than you really don't know that you are standing up, BUT Moore knows he is standing up, thus he is sure that he isn't dreaming. He further attacks the skeptic by saying that how can they be helping themselves to the idea of dreaming, when they themselves said that they cant be certain whether they are dreaming or not in the first place: if this was actually all a dream and there was no external world, the skeptic wouldn't really even have the slightest idea that he is dreaming to begin with...

Thats what Moore had to say on the external world.. good proof or not left aside.. certainly easier to understand than some others out there.