Analysis Of George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge

On the grounds that George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is written so that the reader takes on his arguments cumulatively and not point by point, as the list format implies, I will chunk my analyses to cover his over-arching arguments in the order they are written.

(Para needs thinking about where it belongs) Berkeley begins his treatise by introducing his view of the world: that of the mind and of ideas. ‘Ideas’, are described, as specific packages of sense data. For example, if I were to describe my perception of what I know as a mug on my desk, I would use a variety of my senses to perceive it, I would see it’s colour, shape and reflective material, I would then feel that it is hard, solid and smooth.

His language throughout points one to four is, in fact, charged with emotion and intent. Berkeley repeatedly appeals to the reader, willing us to see the world and its people as he sees them, utilising phrases such as ‘what everybody will allow’ and ‘it is an opinion strangely prevailing’. This declamatory, dialectical style will be used further on to structure a silent dialogue from which Berkeley can argue his ideas. It is a powerful rhetorical device to provoke assumptions from the reader; which puts a brighter spotlight onto the substance of his

Following that, our ideas are inflexible, they cannot be compared to anything but our ideas. I and no one else can think of an object, for example, a table, and compare it to any possible entity of the external world because I have no frame of reference. To abstract beyond the world of internal, perceived ideas, and in doing so prove the existence of the external world we would have to attribute intangible properties which, by definition, are