Three Dialogues Between Hyla And Philonous Summary

George Berkeley, in his work, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, demonstrates his viewpoint of reality in a manner that could be summarized as: “To be is to be perceived”. Berkeley describes this idea as the basis of common sense; in order to acknowledge the existence of a phenomenon, you must be able to actually perceive it through sensible (sight, sound, taste, touch, or feel) means. He believes that everything that exists in the world are actually concepts that are percepted by the the mind; and therefore, believing that anything could exist independent of perception goes against the notion of common sense. The main issue of this argument is that it suggests that everything that we have come to know in this world– including things of nature, all living things, and even everyday non-living items that we see– are actually a series of ideas in our minds. According to Berkeley, these ideas do not exist if no one is there to perceive it.

Berkeley uses the concept of intense heat in the dialogue to reflect this idea with an experiment involving putting hands in bowls of hot, cold, and lukewarm water: “Was it not admitted as a good argument, that neither heat nor cold was in the water, because it seemed warm to one hand and cold to the other?” (67) There is no method of finding a solution to this problem without using a tool other than perception, and if heat is a sensation then it has to rely on our senses to be