An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision by George Berkeley

Read now or download (free!)

Choose how to read this book Url Size
Read online (web) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.html.images 203 kB
EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.epub3.images 145 kB
EPUB (older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.epub.images 147 kB
EPUB (no images, older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.epub.noimages 132 kB
Kindle https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.kf8.images 326 kB
older Kindles https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.kindle.images 315 kB
Plain Text UTF-8 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4722.txt.utf-8 178 kB
Download HTML (zip) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4722/pg4722-h.zip 144 kB
There may be more files related to this item.

About this eBook

Author Berkeley, George, 1685-1753
Title An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision
Note Reading ease score: 49.3 (College-level). Difficult to read.
Credits Produced by Col Choat. HTML version by Al Haines.
Summary "An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision" by George Berkeley is a philosophical treatise written during the early 18th century. The work delves into the concepts of perception, specifically addressing how we perceive distance, magnitude, and the situation of objects through sight. Berkeley challenges existing theories on vision, particularly those that assert we perceive these aspects through mathematical angles and geometrical lines, instead proposing that our perceptions are rooted in experience and the ideas we associate with them. At the start of the essay, Berkeley outlines his intention to investigate how we perceive distance and magnitude, asserting that distance itself is not directly visible but rather inferred through experiential judgment. He discusses the relationship between our sensory perceptions—particularly how the sensations related to the positions of our eyes and the ensuing visual confusion contribute to our judgments on the size and distance of objects. By drawing on allegorical examples, such as the perspective of someone born blind, Berkeley illustrates that our understanding of objects' placement and identity is fundamentally experiential and not inherent in the act of seeing itself; rather, it is shaped by our interactions with tangible reality over time. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Language English
LoC Class B: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion
Subject Vision -- Early works to 1800
Category Text
EBook-No. 4722
Release Date
Most Recently Updated Dec 28, 2020
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 91 downloads in the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free!