Excerpt

In ‘Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed’,1 Miles Burnyeat defends the following theses:

1. Idealism, whether we mean by that Berkeley's own doctrine that esse est percipi or a more vaguely conceived thesis to the effect that everything is in some substantial sense mental or spiritual, is one of the very few major philosophical positions that did not receive its first formulation in antiquity.2
   Descartes had achieved a decisive shift of perspective without which no one, not even Berkeley, could have entertained the thought that esse est percipi.3