The bishop against the magician

George Berkeley's criticism of Isaac Newton's physics

Abstract

Abstract: The article aims to present the criticisms made by the philosopher George Berkeley to modern natural philosophy, in particular to the physics of Isaac Newton. Such criticisms appear first in his epistemological-metaphysical treatise on the principles of human knowledge, and later in a work entirely dedicated to the question of the nature of movement and its communication. From the reading of Berkeley's arguments against Newton, it is possible to demonstrate that the philosopher adopts an anti-realist position in relation to physics that is directly derived from his immaterialist metaphysical theses. Since he claims that in reality there are only spirits and their ideas, the ultimate cause of natural regularities is the will of the divine spirit, and not a supposed intrinsic nature of bodies. Natural philosophy, therefore, will be limited to the use of mathematical hypotheses to identify natural regularities, however without pretensions to determine the real causes of phenomena. Thus, mechanical laws have their epistemic limits determined by a superior knowledge, the metaphysics.