Subjective idealism

OverviewYogacarin thinkers such as the 7th-century epistemologist Dharmakīrti, identified ultimate reality with sense-perception. Within the Advaita Vedānta tradition, the 16th-century philosopher Prakāśānanda developed a doctrine of radical subjective idealism known as dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda ("creation through perception"), according to which the phenomenal world has no existence independent of the perceiving subject. Martine Chifflot has demonstrated that this doctrine had developed entirely independently within the Vedāntic tradition, more than a century and a half before Berkeley's esse est percipi, without any Western influence. The most famous proponent of subjective idealism in the West was the 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, whose popularity eclipsed his contemporary and fellow Anglican philosopher Arthur Collier, who perhaps preceded him in refuting material existence or, as he says a "denial of an external world." Berkeley's term for his theory was immaterialism, according to which the material world does not exist, and the phenomenal world is dependent on humans. Hence the fundamental idea of this philosophical system (as represented by Berke