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A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is a 1710 work by the Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley. In this exceptional work George Berkeley makes the striking claim that physical things consist of nothing but ideas and therefore do not exist outside the mind. This claim establishes him as the founder of the idealist tradition in philosophy. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge largely seeks to refute the claims made by his contemporary John Locke about the nature of human perception. Whilst, like all the Empiricist philosophers, both Locke and George Berkeley agreed that there was an outside world, and it was this world which caused the ideas one has within one's mind; George Berkeley sought to prove that outside world was also composed solely of ideas. George Berkeley did this by suggesting that Ideas can only resemble Ideas - the mental ideas that we possessed could only resemble other ideas (not physical objects) and thus the external world consisted not of physical form, but rather ideas. This world was given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley did his best to conclude was a God. Long refuted by most philosophers, Berkeley's claims in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge are often felt to have been a form of rationalization. In spite of this George Berkeley was a capable, respected and entertaining thinker. Some doubt exists as to whether he truly believed his conclusion that the world at large was composed of ideas; with modern thinking tending towards him indeed having thought this to be the case.

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Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a preacher, theologian, and missionary to Native Americans. Edwards is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian, and one of America's greatest intellectuals. Edwards's theological work is very broad in scope, but he is often associated with his defense of Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his life's work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how central The Enlightenment was to his mindset. Edwards played a very critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening, and oversaw some of the first fires of revival in 1733-1735 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards delivered the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a classic of early American literature, during another wave of revival in 1741, following George Whitefield's tour of the Thirteen Colonies. Edwards is widely known for his many books: The End For Which God Created the World; The Life of David Brainerd, which served to inspire thousands of missionaries throughout the nineteenth century; and Religious Affections, which many Reformed Evangelicals read even today. Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation shortly after beginning the presidency at the College of New Jersey (later to be named Princeton University), and was the grandfather of Aaron Burr.

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