George Berkeley managed a 96-acre plantation in Newport, Rhode Island, purchasing enslaved people to work the land, while simultaneously being famous across Europe for arguing that physical matter does not exist. This episode explores that contradiction, starting with his 1709 essay on vision, which rejected the geometric optics of Descartes and argued that we learn depth through touch and habit rather than seeing it directly, and the cataract surgery report he likely ghostwrote to support his theory.

The hosts then unpack subjective idealism and the phrase esse est percipi, Berkeley's attack on John Locke's primary and secondary qualities, the three-buckets thought experiment, and his solution to the problem of permanence: God as the omnipresent perceiver. They cover Samuel Johnson kicking a stone, the failed Bermuda college project, Trini ...