Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have 1 first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. . . . there are some passages that, taken by themselves, are very liable (nor could it be remedied) to gross misinterpretation, and to be charged with most absurd consequences, which, nevertheless, upon an entire perusal will 2 appear not to follow from them. In an effort to comply with these excellent principles of Berkeley's, I have tried to avoid complex language throughout this book, and to give all of his works the careful scrutiny he urges in order to avoid misplaced emphasis and quoting out of context. George Berkeley waS born in Dysert Castle, Thomastown, Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1685. He is among the best known of Western philosophers, but a brief sketch of the high points of his life might nonetheless be of some interest. His father William Berkeley was related to Lord Berkeley of Stratton, who was the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1670 to 1672. His mother was probably related to General Wolfe, the conqueror of Montcalm in Canada. He was educated at Kilkenny School, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in 1704 and 1707 respectively.

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Exciting the Industry of Mankind is the first comprehensive book about George Berkeley's revolutionary views on money and banking. Berkeley broke the conceptual link between money and metallic substance in The Querist, a work published between 1735 and 1737 in Dublin, consisting entirely of questions. Exciting the Industry of Mankind explains what economic and social forces caused Berkeley to write The Querist in response to a major economic crisis in Ireland. Exciting the Industry of Mankind falsifies the view that Berkeley has nothing to tell us about our present and future social and economic life. For the `idealism' Berkeley found in the money form is now becoming a fact of global economic life, when `xenomoney' and `virtual money' exchanges begin to dwarf commodity transactions, and the future becomes the dominant temporal dimension of economic activity. Philosophers, historians, cultural theorists, economists and lovers of Irish history will be interested in this volume.

Stephen Daniel presents a study of the philosophy of George Berkeley in the intellectual context of his times, with a particular focus on how, for Berkeley, mind is related to its ideas. Daniel does not assume that thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, or Locke define for Berkeley the context in which he develops his own thought. Instead, he indicates how Berkeley draws on a tradition that informed his early training and that challenges much of the early modern thought with which he is often associated. Specifically, this book indicates how Berkeley's distinctive treatment of mind (as the activity whereby objects are differentiated and related to one another) highlights how mind neither precedes the existence of objects nor exists independently of them. This distinctive way of understanding the relation of mind and objects allows Berkeley to appropriate ideas from his contemporaries in ways that transform the issues with which he is engaged. The resulting insights--for example, about how God creates the minds that perceive objects--are only now starting to be fully appreciated.

George Berkeley was considered "the most engaging and useful man in Ireland in the eighteenth century". This hyperbolic statement refers both to Berkeley’s life and thought; in fact, he always considered himself a pioneer called to think and do new things. He was an empiricist well versed in the sciences, an amateur of the mechanical arts, as well as a metaphysician; he was the author of many completely different discoveries, as well as a very active Christian, a zealous bishop and the apostle of the Bermuda project. The essays collected in this volume, written by some leading scholars, aim to reconstruct the complexity of Berkeley’s figure, without selecting "major" works, nor searching for "coherence" at any cost. They will focus on different aspects of Berkeley’s thought, showing their intersections; they will explore the important contributions he gave to various scientific disciplines, as well as to the eighteenth-century philosophical and theological debate. They will highlight the wide influence that his presently most neglected or puzzling books had at the time; they will refuse any anachronistical trial of Berkeley’s thought, judged from a contemporary point of view.

George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written--even literary--style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.

Through a close analysis of key texts and the larger historical contexts within which they were composed, this study explores George Berkeley's engagement with the social and economic threats facing Ireland and Britain, highlighting his belief that virtue and religion could play crucial roles in alleviating these problems.

George Berkeley's doctrine of notions is often disparaged or dismissed. In a systematic interpretation and positive reconstruction of the doctrine, James Hill presents Berkeley's understanding of the inner sphere and self-awareness, and reassesses the widely held view of Berkeley as an empiricist. Examining the development of Berkeley's philosophy from the early notebooks to the late Siris, Hill sets out how knowledge by notion involves a radical rejection of the perceptual model of self-cognition and of the attempt to frame our knowledge of the inner by analogy with the outer. He points to Berkeley's divergence from the assumption among rationalists and empiricists that we know our selves and our mental acts by idea, or by an immediate presentation before the mind. Weaving together Berkeley's conception of the intellect, conceptual thought, mathematics, ethics and theology in the light of the doctrine of notions, Hill invites us to treat Berkeley's philosophy of mind as distinct from the empiricist tradition. This cutting edge reflection on the doctrine of notions is essential reading for students and scholars specialising in Berkeley as well as early modern accounts of the self, perception and God.

Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) is Berkeley's main work of philosophical theology and a crucial source of his views on meaning and language. This edition contains the four most important dialogues and a selection of critical essays and commentaries reflecting the response of such writers as Hutcheson, Mill and Antony Flew. The only single edition currently in print, it argues that Alciphron has a more important place both in the Berkeley canon and in early modern philosophy than is generally thought.