Berkeley's Three Dialogues

I'm reading Berkeley's Three Dialogues at the moment,and it is taking bloody forever, probably because a) I have very little time this week and b) I am a lazy bugger. (Seriously. Meant to get up at nine, finally staggered out of bed at half eleven, wandered into the kitchen, didn't do any work, wandered into my room, didn't do any work, wandered to Social Science Library, didn't do any work. Then jacinthsong dropped by and it seemed like a glorious excuse for a break from not doing any work.)

That said, I have done some of it now. A fair chunk, anyway. And have got to the bit where, Philonous, Berkeley's mouthpiece throughout the dialogues, says: "To me it is evident that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. Whereas I conclude, seeing that they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist."

And it reminded me of something that made me laugh. There aren't that many books about philosophy for children - which is a travesty - so the one there is is one that everyone's read. Sophie's World, a philosophical mystery that me-at-ten found deliciously intricate (and exotic; the book is translated out of the Norwegian and is peppered with cultural references) and something of an awakening. It's not the book that changed my life, as I don't think I have one of those, but it probably came quite close. It was my first introduction to the idea that philosophy, rather than being a long word that I vaguely knew the meaning of, was the name of something I knew: for the habit of asking questions like who are you and where does the world come from?

I was interested in philosophy before - having Pedar largely responsible for my childhood education made that sort of inevitable - but it wasn't until I read Sophie's World that I realised it was a subject, something people did like the subjects you do at school, only far more interesting. (Why don't they teach philosophy in schools, I ask you? It's far more important than, I don't know, geography, or - ick - religious education. Philosophy is who we are and where we come from, and it's important. And not everyone who's interested in it gets given books about it, like I was, and that strikes me as such a waste.)

So I guess I blame that book for having got me here, doing PPE, yes, but then that's because at Oxford eighteen is considered too young to read philosophy on its own. You need to combine it with something to help your mind contexutalise it, which is probably sensible. And I've managed to make five of my eight Finals papers philosophy ones, regardless.

And all the way through the book, Berkeley is the joke. There is "something funny about that particular philosopher" - and look away now if you plan to read it, I'm about to spoil it - and this finally becomes apparent with the above passage from the Dialogues. The story is about Sophie, a fourteen-year-old girl who's doing a philosophy course, taught by an eccentric monk-type figure called Alberto, and on her fifteenth birthday, he teaches her Berkeley's main thesis - that nothing and no one exists at all, that we are all mere thoughts in the mind of God.

I remember reading that for the first time and thinking it was an extraordinary thought - nothing is real? - and finding Sophie's irritation at having been told this on her birthday very real and yes, somewhat amusing.

And so here I am, ten years later, not doing any work, but I've just read it, finally. Nothing is real, according to Berkeley, unless we are perceived, unless we are imagined by something greater than ourselves.

And it's surprising how cheerful an amateur philosopher that makes me. Because, lest we forget, I really do love my subject with a passion. All you people who do English, I love yours too. And the chemists, and classicists, and I am, technically, a political scientist. But philosophy for the eternal win.