The Great Philosophers EP06 ⟩ “Michael R. Ayers on Locke and Berkeley”
Details
Join us as we savor and scrutinize Bryan Magee’s conversation with Michael R. Ayers on John Locke and George Berkeley. Our Meetup will try to both (a) provide a critical examination of their revolutionary ideas and (b) show their relevance to today’s pressing issues.
John Locke (1632 – 1704): The Empirical Groundbreaker
Locke’s empiricism, the belief that knowledge writes itself onto consciousness from outer experience, laid the groundwork for liberal democracy and modern science. His call to question authority and rely on observable facts resonated through the French Revolution and influenced the American Constitution. Today, Locke’s emphasis on empirical evidence has suddenly become relevant again in, for example, addressing climate change. His insistence on basing conclusions on observable data directly aligns with our need for evidence-based approaches in environmental, social, criminal-justice, and political-economic policies.
George Berkeley (1685 – 1753): The Idealist Visionary
Berkeley, an Irish philosopher educated at Trinity College, Dublin, is renowned for (ingeniously) challenging Locke’s theory on the basis of his own empirical principles. Berkeley, reacting against Locke, argued that the only things we can know are our perceptions. Since primary qualities are constituted by secondary ones, there is no bridge from ideal to non-ideal. In today’s digital age, Berkeley’s thesis raises critical questions about virtual reality, online personas, and our spectacular simulacrum of a society. How much of our digital experience is real—what does that even mean anymore— and how does it shape our understanding of the world? Berkeley’s philosophy prompts us to question the authenticity of our increasingly non-physical lives.
Kant 300 Part III
Friendly Reminder: This will be the third part of our Kantian Quadfecta that promises to finally deliver adequate understanding of Kant’s theory of mathematical objective constructivism. From each of the preceding philosophers in our series, some informing idea will be kept and will bear fruit in Kant’s system:
From Descartes, Kant received (a) the heterogeneity of subject and object, which Kant will transmute into spontaneity and reception, act and intuition; and (b) the Cartesian grid which links algebraic terms with ostensive objective schemata.
From Leibniz, Kant inherited (a) his love of minimalism and reductivism, (b) top–down principle-based system building, (c) the theory of truth as concept containment, (d) the analysis of judgments into truths of reason and matters of fact.
From Spinoza, Kant took the possibility of fusing understanding and intuition in a single underlying subject.
From Locke, Kant acquired (a) his restriction of the innate provisions of reason, or “pure reason,” to formal rationality; and (b) his concern with the mysterious nature of substance as both a necessary, yet entirely non-empirical, presentation.
From Berkeley, Kant got (a) his inspiration to elevate the status of space to reality-penetrating ideality; and (b) the correlative argument showing that inner determinations depend on an outer.
From Hume, … stay tuned! That’s next time!
METHOD
Please watch the episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event to refresh our memories for debate and discussion. A new high-def version of this episode with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, transcripts, timelines, tables, mind-blowing tangential observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the Magee Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
OUR CURRENT SERIES
Bryan Magee’s The Great Philosophers (1987) is a series of unparalleled philosophical dialogues. In them, the world’s greatest philosophical interlocutor interrogates the greatest philosophers of his day about the greatest philosophers of all time … in chronological order:
- Plato, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza/Leibniz, Locke/Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel/Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger/Existentialism, Pragmatism, Frege/Russell, and Wittgenstein.