Editor's Introduction Outline Analysis Chronology Selected Bibliography Note on the Texts A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Three Dialogues between Hylas & Philonous Philosophical Correspondence between Berkeley & Samuel Johnson Index
George Berkeley (/ˈbɑːrklɪ/;[1][2] 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753) — known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne) — was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
In 2016, while on a family trip to Ireland, we spent a couple of days in Kilkenny and our hotel was Berkeley House. The good bishop had gone to school in Kilkenny, so knowing he had some connection to the city, I asked the clerk if this was the house that Bishop George Berkeley the philosopher had lived in? She stared at me blankly and said she didn't know. Sigh.
In 2014, while at the Yale Writer's Conference, conference attendees all stayed in in Berkeley College, definitely named after the bishop. Annoying, Yalies mispronounce the name as if it is "Burk-ley" instead of "Bark-ley."
For some time now I've been reading back through the philosophical canon, including texts I last read in grad school a quarter of a century ago, such as this one, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
I liked the Introduction, which I didn't remember being so strong. It is a criticism of abstract ideas with good discussions of how language works. Here he anticipates William James's pragmatism, Alfred North Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and some aspects of Analytic Philosophy. An example, "Whereas, in truth, there is no such thing as one precise and definite signification annexed to any general name, they all signifying indifferently a great number of particular ideas." A good rebuke to, among others, Socrates and his attempts to get THE definition of various concepts.
But after the Introduction, as Berkeley argues for Idealism--the philosophy that only ideas exist--I just found him much harder to take than I did when I first read it. And since I don't have to read it for a class or comps, I was able to quickly skim through, re-reading some texts I had liked before (such as a paragraph on the difficulty of understanding time that I quoted in my dissertation) but otherwise finding his arguments and claims rather bad.
So, interestingly, my recent re-reading of Leibniz elevated him in my appreciation and Berkeley drops in my estimation.