Baseball and Philosophy

It's around the corner. All over the Sunbelt, professional baseball players are reporting to spring training.

But, first, some context. In college, I explored Philosophy as my major. I did not read particularly deeply but everything quickly boiled down to two huge voices in my head -- Descartes vs. Berkeley. Of course, the dialectical materialists (Hegel, Marx and Engels) also eventually (and inevitably) had their way with me.

Descartes was a rationalist, and the founder of one of my favorites subjects -- analytic geometry -- which is a bridge between algebra and geometry, and which helped lead to the creation of calculus (one of my least favorite subjects). Descartes, it can be argued, helped stimulate the line of western thought that was ready to help exploit the emergence of the computer in our time, the most rationalist of times. Descartes is best known for his statement: "I think, therefore I am," which you have to admit, is a cool sound bite, if ever there were one.

But for me, there was another philosopher, George Berkeley, who was much more in line with my own way of thinking. Berkeley (pronounced BARK-LAY) was one of three famous eighteenth century British Empiricists, along with John Locke and David Hume. While I struggled with the latter two, Berkeley grabbed my soul with his famous phrase, esse is percipi, or, "to be is to be perceived."



Thus, he was an empirical idealist who believed that nothing actually existed unless a mind existed that perceived it to exist. He believed that matter does not exist. Actually, I suspect he was a maniac, because he argued that physical objects were composed of ideas, i.e., mental projections.

I fell in love with Berkeley when he offered the following proposition (according to my memory): "If a tree fell in a forest, but no one was around to see, hear, touch or smell that tree, how could its existence be certain to have occurred?" He was therefore the father of subjective idealism.

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Back to baseball. I've always wondered about the times that you achieve a home run, but no one who knows you witnesses this event. Did it really happen? Or any of life's other moments?

Do we need a witness? (Happy Valentine's Night.)
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