Pain And Pleasure-Pain Argument Analysis

Humans perceive our surroundings through our various senses; it has been argued that all of these feelings and impressions exist only within the perceiver’s mind. Irish philosopher and Empiricist George Berkeley argues in his Three Dialogues that heat and cold that we directly perceive is no different from pain or pleasure, which are ideas that only exist in the mind, since these feelings stem from the mind as a result of our contact with the outside world (Radcliffe, McCarty, Allhoff, and Vaidya 56). In this essay, I will provide arguments to justify that Berkeley’s pleasure-pain argument fails to justify his claim that pain and pleasure can only exist in one’s mind. In Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, in which Philonous, who represents Berkeley, and Hylas, who speaks for Locke, engaged in a prolonged discussion over

In creating this argument of pleasure and pain, Berkeley is trying to support his claim to a mind-dependent world, rejecting Locke’s idea of mind-independent physical world, since Berkeley believed that God created the image that humans or other beings see in their minds, and that we create our own idea and interpretation of these God-made impressions in our mind. The difference between immediate and mediate perception is the fact that immediate perception is directly perceived by our senses, whereas mediate perception is indirectly perceived and requires some medium in order to be sensed by our mind. For example, when a friend is running towards you as he’s yelling, the sound of yelling is the immediate perception, and the perception of the friend running towards you would be mediate. In the Three Dialogues, Philonous begins as he asserts to Hylas that sensible things are those that our senses could immediately perceive, he argues that a mind independent object can’t feel pleasure or pain, since unless a thinking mind thinks about it, it can’t be hot or cold (Radcliffe, McCarty,