Immaterialism

[brian livesey]

As an aside to the previous post, eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, claimed that tangible matter ( hard stuff ) doesn't exist at all, and that the entire universe consists of intangible ideas in the mind of God.
Amusingly, when Berkeley visited Johnathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, Berkeley was refused admission. Swift said that if, according to Berkeley, the front door was only an idea, Berkeley could walk straight through it without the need for Swift to open the door for him.

[mikemarotta]

Many modern errors can be classed in the same category as Bishop Berkeley's idealism. Back in May, I sat through some of Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Spacetime Odyssey" and found it lacking. Watching this on DVD with the captions on allowed me to identify an array of failures of science, reason, and fact.

[brian livesey]

Locke, Berkeley, Hume, etc, were trailblazers in the development of Theory of Knowlege ( a department of Epistemology ), essential to modern scientific investigation. Einstein made plenty of scientific errors, but he was always prepared to recant and move on.