A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish philosopher, an anglican bishop and one of the three great British empiricists along with John Locke and David Hume. Ignored and derided in life, he is now widely re-evaluated and considered as a sort of indirect precursor of Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr for his thesis on the non-existence of matter and the impossibility of an objectively absolute time and space. His critiques of mathematics and science are among the most controversial, brilliant and revolutionary in the history of philosophy. The publication of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 marked a seismic shift in the landscape of Western metaphysics. At a time when the "New Science" of Isaac Newton and the representational realism of John Locke were cementing a worldview defined by inert, material substances, George Berkeley—then a young Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin—ventured a thesis so audacious that it remains one of the most provocative challenges in the history of philosophy: the denial of the existence of Matter.