Barclays New Theory Of Ideas

George Berkeley is one of the most famous philosophers in the history of WesternPhilosophy, a major representative of the modern Britain’s Empiricism. With greatfeatured philosophical thinking and rigorous demonstration, he is recognized as acontroversial philosopher, yet hard to be refuted. As an important concept of modernEpistemological philosophy, Idea is the core category of Berkeley’s philosophy,through which Berkeley’s unique philosophy system was constructed. However, beingshadowed by John Locke’s Idea Theory, Berkeley hasn’t been valued in academiccircles. This article aims to hackle and dig into Berkeley’s philosophy as a result thatwe can make an objective and fair evaluation on its gains and losses.This article is divided into four parts.In the first part, Historical research method is used to identify the ideological basisof Berkeley’s Idea theory. In order to simplify the writing style and argue from therelated perspective of Berkeley’s theory, this part mainly observes and studies Plato’sand Locke’s Idea theory, which respectively represent the Idea theory in ancient Greekand modern philosophy, and lay foundation for Berkeley’s theory as far source and nearsource.In the second part, Berkeley’s Idea theory is systematically illustrated. At thebeginning of this part, the meaning of two propositions including“Idea is an object forcognition”and“the existence of Idea is to be perceived”is introduced, which isclosely followed by further illustration of Idea by summarizing its four characteristics.After that, this part also summarizes Berkeley’s classification theories of ideas throughwhich Idea theory can be better illustrated.The third part is the philosophic system construction with the concept at its core.Idea is the core category of Berkeley philosophy. On the basis of interpretation of theIdea, Berkeley constructs his philosophic system, which permeates Idea everywhere.First，the interpretation of the conceptualization of the material. He interprets his ‘immaterial theory’from three aspects:‘negation of the material substance’,‘interpretation of the conceptualization of properties’, and‘material is the collectionof the idea’. The Idea loses traditionally considered entity support after the eliminationof the material. Therefore, he has to seek new basis for the Idea. Through theexploration of the Idea’s ontology, after the idea development of‘the first argument’and‘he second idea’, Berkeley finally finds the God theory as the eventual basis andultimately establishes the philosophic system that taking the Idea as the kernel.In the fourth part, the influence and evaluation of Berkeley’s Idea theory isdiscussed.Looking at Berkeley’s Idea theory from dialectic point of view, there aresome defects in Berkeley’s Idea theory, the God theory mainly, which suffers the mostcriticizes. The integrity of Berkeley’s philosophic system rests with the theory of God,which is the crux of his philosophic system.And there are many unknown factors andparadoxes in his theory. From the other side, the value of Berkeley Idea theory lies inthe positive factors in his philosophic theory itself and the effects on the developmentof philosophy after him, which include the tendency of anti-tradition metaphysics, thesurpass to the binary opposition thinking model and the influence to the enormousimpact phenomenology in modern philosophy.