Bishop George Berkeley

Bishop George Berkeley was an 18th-century philosopher who proposed that reality is fundamentally linked to perception. He famously coined the phrase "esse est percipi," meaning "to be is to be perceived." According to Berkeley, objects only exist when they are observed; for instance, a tree falling in a forest makes no sound if no one is there to hear it. He challenged the idea of material substance, suggesting that our perceptions shape our understanding of reality, and emphasized the importance of the mind and sensory experiences in forming knowledge about the world.