Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time Book

While this books meant as a companion to reading the the Treatise, I read it as a stand along text to bet a better sense of a philosopher who's ideas long intreated me, but who I never quite understood. It was a very readable guide to Berkley's ideas and left me a great appreciation of Berkley's idealism (e.g. that the world is made of ideas not matter). While few would agree completely with Berkely's premise, he is discussing problems that are still much discussed in philosophy, science, and psychology - how we create a conscious world from objects that don't directly properties we sense, do we directly experience reality/objects, if not how can we avoid total skepticism. In the end, there is something lovely about the idea that ideas are the stuff of the world. And when we consider how little we actually know outside of what we perceive in our minds, the theory has more common sense than it might appear at first.

- Berkley was an empiricist - but instead of perceiving matter, we perceive ideas. Most people today are material monists - there is nothing but matter. Berkley was a monist as well, but just believing in a world of ideas. The best I can describe it is that while most people believe the world is made up of matter and energy, Berkley believed it was made from minds and ideas
- Things were real and not illusions. They were just made of ideas and not matter.
- These ideas could only be experienced in your mind. With no mind perceiving the idea, there was no reality.
- God is the ultimate observer,keeping
- Living in the early scientific age, Berkley anticipated and responded to most all of the objections one might raise today (how to account for the laws of science, processes we can't observe (e.g. the turning of the earth) While one might not buy Berkley's responses, he did think of them.