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Page 1 of 3

Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009
  • George Berkeley (1685–1753) was a university teacher, a missionary, and later a Church of Ireland bishop. The over-riding objective of his long philosophical career was to counteract objections to religious belief that resulted from new philosophies associated with the Scientific Revolution. Accordingly, he argued against scepticism and atheism in the Principles and the Three Dialogues; he rejected theories of force in the Essay on Motion; he offered a new theory of meaning for religious language in Alciphron; and he modified his earlier immaterialism in Siris by speculating about the body's influence on the soul. His radical empiricism and scientific instrumentalism, which rejected the claims of the sciences to provide a realistic interpretation of phenomena, are still influential today. This edition provides texts from the full range of Berkeley's contributions to philosophy, together with an introduction by Desmond M. Clarke that sets them in their historical and philosophical contexts.

Descartes: A Biography
  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Published online:
    18 July 2009
    Print publication:
    06 March 2006
  • René Descartes is best remembered today for writing 'I think, therefore I am', but his main contribution to the history of ideas was his effort to construct a philosophy that would be sympathetic to the new sciences that emerged in the seventeenth century. To a great extent he was the midwife to the Scientific Revolution and a significant contributor to its key concepts. In four major publications, he fashioned a philosophical system that accommodated the needs of these new sciences and thereby earned the unrelenting hostility of both Catholic and Calvinist theologians, who relied on the scholastic philosophy that Descartes hoped to replace. His contemporaries claimed that his proofs of God's existence in the Meditations were so unsuccessful that he must have been a cryptic atheist and that his discussion of skepticism served merely to fan the flames of libertinism. This is the first biography in English that addresses the full range of Descartes' interest in theology, philosophy and the sciences and that traces his intellectual development through his entire career.

  • A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp 67-150

  • Summary

    Wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into.

    2nd edition 1734

    [The Preface

    What I here make public has, after a long and scrupulous inquiry, seemed to me evidently true, and not unuseful to be known, particularly to those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul. Whether it be so or no, I am content the reader should impartially examine, since I do not think my self any farther concerned for the success of what I have written, than as it is agreeable to truth. But to the end this may not suffer, I make it my request that the reader suspend his judgment, till he has once, at least, read the whole through with that degree of attention and thought which the subject matter shall seem to deserve. For as 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 appear not to follow from them: so likewise, though the whole should be read over, yet, if this be done transiently, it is very probable my sense may be mistaken; but to a thinking reader, I flatter my self, it will be throughout clear and obvious.

  • Introduction

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp ix-xxxvi

  • Summary

    ‘There are men who say there are insensible extensions, there are others who say the wall is not white, the fire is not hot &c. We Irish men cannot attain to these truths.’

    George Berkeley may have been echoing Swift's irony when he linked his nationality, as an Irishman, with the limited scope of his ideas. However, his apparent diffidence about the metaphysical excursions of others did not prevent him from proposing, in his relative youth, a form of idealism that many of his contemporaries considered counter-intuitive and possibly irrational. The so-called immaterialism of the Principles and the Dialogues may still strike some readers today as bizarre, or even as symptomatic of psychiatric illness, because it appears to deny the reality of familiar objects of everyday experience. There is, therefore, a paradox at the core of what Berkeley presents as a ‘revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense’ (D, 172). On the one hand, he claims to defend common sense, not to speculate beyond the limits of sensory experience, and to provide a bulwark against scepticism. On the other hand, he seems to deny the reality of the familiar physical world, of houses, mountains and rivers, and even of the people with whom we discuss the merits of philosophical theories.

  • An Essay on Motion

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp 243-268

  • Summary

    Motion; or the Principle and Nature of Motion, and the Cause of the Communication of Motions 1721

    1 In order to discover the truth, it is most important that one avoid being obstructed by words that are poorly understood. While almost all philosophers give this advice, few observe it. Indeed, it hardly seems so difficult to do so, especially in matters that are discussed by physicists, in which sensation, experience, and geometrical reasoning are appropriate. Accordingly, having set aside as much as possible all prejudices that result either from common ways of speaking or from the authority of philosophers, one should examine diligently the very nature of things. Nor should the authority of anyone be valued to such an extent that their words and terms are prized even when nothing clear and certain can be found in them.

    2 The consideration of motion troubled the minds of ancient philosophers very much; their thinking gave rise to a range of views which were extraordinarily difficult (not to say absurd) and which, since they have now lapsed almost into desuetude, hardly deserve that we devote much effort to discussing them. However, among the more recent and more sensible philosophers of the current period, when they discuss motion, one finds many words whose meaning is too abstract and obscure, such as the ‘solicitation of gravity’, ‘striving’, ‘dead forces’, etc.

  • An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp 1-66

  • Summary

    3rd edition 1732

    The Contents

    Section

  • 1 Design

  • 2 Distance of itself invisible

  • 3 Remote distance perceived rather by experience than by sense

  • 4 Near distance thought to be perceived by the angle of the ‘optic axes’

  • 5 Difference between this and the former manner of perceiving distance

  • 6 Also by diverging rays

  • 7 This depends not on experience

  • 8 These the common accounts, but not satisfactory

  • 9 Some ideas perceived by mediation of others

  • 10 No idea which is not itself perceived can be the means of perceiving another

  • 11 Distance perceived by means of some other idea

  • 12 Those lines and angles mentioned in optics are not themselves perceived

  • 13 Hence the mind does not perceive distance by lines and angles

  • 14 Also because they have no real existence

  • 15 And because they are insufficient to explain the phenomena

  • 16 The ideas that suggest distance are 1st the sensation arising from the turn of the eyes

  • 17 Betwixt which and distance there is no necessary connexion

  • 18 Scarce room for mistake in this matter

  • 19 No regard had to the angle of the optic axes

  • 20 Judgment of distance made with both eyes, the result of experience

  • 21 2ndly. Confusedness of appearance

  • 22 This the occasion of those judgments attributed to diverging rays.

  • 23 Objection answered

  • 24 What deceives the writers of optics in this matter

  • 25 The cause, why one idea may suggest another

  • 26 This applied to confusion and distance

  • 27 3rdly. The straining of the eye

  • 28 The occasions which suggest distance have in their own nature no relation to it

  • 29 A difficult case proposed by Dr. Barrow as repugnant to all the known theories

  • […]

  • Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water [excerpts]

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp 315-331

  • Summary

    New edition 1747

    [excerpts]

    For introduction to the following piece, I assure the reader that nothing could, in my present situation, have induced me to be at the pains of writing it but a firm belief that it would prove a valuable present to the public. What entertainment soever the reasoning or notional part may afford the mind, I will venture to say the other part seems so surely calculated to do good to the body that both must be gainers. For if the lute be not well tuned, the musician fails in his harmony. And, in our present state, the operations of the mind so far depend on the right tone or good condition of its instrument that anything which greatly contributes to preserve or recover the health of the body is well worth the attention of the mind. These considerations have moved me to communicate to the public the salutary virtues of tar-water; to which I thought myself indispensably obliged by the duty every man owes to mankind. And, as effects are linked with their causes, my thought on this low but useful theme led to farther inquiries, and those on to others, remote perhaps and speculative, but, I hope, not altogether useless or unentertaining.

    1 In certain parts of America, tar-water is made by putting a quart of cold water to a quart of tar, and stirring them well together in a vessel, which is left standing till the tar sinks to the bottom.

  • Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher [excerpts]

  • Desmond M. Clarke
  • Book:
    Berkeley: Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 January 2009, pp 269-314

  • Summary

    In Seven Dialogues, Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against those who are called free-thinkers.

    3rd edition 1752

    [Excerpts from Dialogues IV and VII]

    The Fourth Dialogue

    1 Early the next morning, as I looked out of my window, I saw Alciphron walking in the garden with all the signs of a man in deep thought. Upon which I went down to him.

    Alciphron, said I, this early and profound meditation puts me in no small fright. How so? Because I should be sorry to be convinced there was no God. The thought of anarchy in nature is to me more shocking than in civil life, inasmuch as natural concerns are more important than civil and the basis of all others.

    I grant, replied Alciphron, that some inconvenience may possibly follow from disproving a God; but as to what you say of fright and shocking, all that is nothing but prejudice, mere prejudice. Men frame an idea or chimera in their own minds, and then fall down and worship it. Notions govern mankind; but of all notions, that of God's governing the world has taken the deepest root and spread the farthest. It is therefore in philosophy an heroical achievement to dispossess this imaginary monarch of his government, and banish all those fears and spectres which the light of reason alone can dispel:

    Non radii solis, non lucida tela diei

    Discutiunt, sed naturae species ratioque.

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