Berkeley, o le conseguenze scandalose dell’empirismo

The fate of British empiricism, symbolically inaugurated by Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is marked at the dawn of the eighteenth century by an unexpected and, in some respects, scandalous shift: the immaterialism of George Berkeley (1685–1753). A decidedly empiricist thinker, insofar as he adheres to the principle nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu, Berkeley brings to completion a radicalization of Locke’s project destined to transform the face of classical empiricism and to undermine some of its central theoretical principles. Among the cornerstones targeted by Berkeley’s critique are the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the notion of substance, and the centrality of abstraction in the cognitive process—each of which is superseded in the name of a new doctrine that makes perception the foundation of being and immaterialism the only possible metaphysics.