Berkeley’s Ideal Body. Status of the Body in George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Perception Presented in the New Theory of Vision

Abstract

George Berkeley’s philosophy is a specific combination of idealism and empiricism. Berkeley is well known primarily for his view/theory/thesis that material objects do not exist. In the New Theory of Vision he presents a cognition process grounded in sensory perception, thus giving the senses a privileged role in cognition.

The article is an attempt to answer the question about the status of the body and corporeality in such process of cognition as in the context of Berkeley’s immaterialism. I propose such a reading of  the Essay of the New Theory of Vision which does not focus on its content in the perspective of the later, Treatise on the Principles of Human Cognition which is considered to be the most important of Berkeley’s works. Instead, I look at those passages where Berkeley uses concepts related to the body and corporeality – primarily tactile ideas, which play a key role in the cognition process – to see how, according to Berkeley’s doctrine, the sensual body of the perceiving person is to be understood. In his mature doctrine, Berkeley admits the existence of only two kinds of entities: active minds and passive ideas. Therefore, the sensual body of the/a perceiving person must be classified as one of them. In the article, I argue that he could not have done otherwise than identify a perceiving body with an active mind.