George Berkeley

George Berkeley (1685-1753), born in Dysert, was an Irishman of English origin. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700; he was made a Master of Arts and Fellow there in 1707. He entered the orders and was responsible for teaching Greek, Hebrew, and theology. Few philosophers have been more precocious and have had a doctrine more quickly established; his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710, already contains all its features, and the previous year, his Essay on a New Theory of Vision had made one of its aspects known; his book of notes, the Commonplace Book, written between 1702 and 1710, shows it in its formation.

The Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, published in 1713, give a new exposition of it, which is addressed to a very wide public; Berkeley claimed in fact, by the correction of the philosophical errors that he fought, to renew moral and religious sentiments and to overcome the sect of freethinkers; during his stay in London, he directly attacked, in his articles in The Guardian (1713), Arthur Collins, one of the most famous freethinkers. The following years (1713-1720) were occupied by travels in France, perhaps in Spain, and especially in Italy and Sicily where he was as interested in geology and geography as in archaeology. It was in France, in Lyon, during his return to England, that he wrote De Motu (1720) in which he attacked Newton’s physics.

In 1723, he had been for two years Dean of Derry in Ireland, when he inherited the fortune of Esther Vanhomrigh: he immediately had the idea of using it to propagate Christian civilization and thought in the American possessions of England and he made known to the public his intention of founding a college in Bermuda; on the promise of a large subsidy from the government of Robert Walpole, he left in 1728, and he stayed in Rhode Island where he waited in vain; the money was not sent to him, and he himself became less enthusiastic about his project; during his stay in Rhode Island, which lasted until 1731, he studied for the first time closely the Neo-Platonic philosophers Plotinus and Produs, who were to have so much influence on his later works;

He wrote Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher (1732), which continued The Guardian‘s polemic against free thought; there he met Jonathan Edwards, who propagated his ideas in America. On his return to England (1732), Alciphron and the third edition of Essay on Vision were the occasion of a polemic with mathematicians, marked by the Defense and Explanation of the Theory of Vision (1733), The Analyst (1734). In the same year, he published a new edition of Dialogues and Principles, containing very important doctrinal additions.

He was appointed Bishop of Cloyne, an Irish diocese populated mainly by Catholics: the unfortunate state of Ireland gave him the opportunity to deal with economic questions (The Querist, 1735-1737; Letter on a National Bank of Ireland, 1737) and moral questions (Discourse against License and Irreligion of the Time, 1737); on several occasions (notably in 1745 during the Scottish revolt in favor of the Stuarts), he affirmed his desire for understanding with the Catholics (Letter to the Roman Catholics of the Diocese of Cloyne, 1745; Word to the Wise, 1749; Maxims of Patriotism, 1751).

An epidemic that occurred in Ireland in 1740 gave him the opportunity to experiment with tar water as a remedy, a remedy that he had known in Rhode Island and in which he believed he saw the universal panacea: this was the starting point for his last philosophical work, Siris or Reflections and philosophical research concerning the virtues of Tar Skin and various other related subjects and arising from one of the other (1744), or the search for the reasons for the effectiveness of the marvelous remedy brings him to Platonic metaphysics.