George Berkeley - Place in The History of Philosophy

Place in The History of Philosophy

Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was published three years before the publication of Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis, which made assertions similar to those of Berkeley's. However, there seemed to have been no influence or communication between the two writers.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote of him: "Berkeley was, therefore, the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity. He is the father of idealism...".

George Berkeley has gone down in the handbooks as a great spokesman of British empiricism.

Today, every student of the history of philosophy is familiar with the view that there was a sort of linear development involving three great “British Empiricists”, leading from Locke through Berkeley to Hume.

Berkeley influenced many modern philosophers, especially David Hume. Thomas Reid admitted that he put forward a drastic criticism of Berkeleianism after he had been an admirer of Berkeley’s philosophical system for a long time. Berkeley’s “thought made possible the work of Hume and thus Kant, notes Alfred North Whitehead.” Some authors draw a parallel between Berkeley and Edmund Husserl.

During Berkeley’s lifetime his philosophical ideas were comparatively uninfluential. But interest in his doctrine grew from the 1870s when Alexander Campbell Fraser, “the leading Berkeley scholar of the nineteenth century,” published “The Works of George Berkeley.” A powerful impulse to serious studies in Berkeley’s philosophy was given by A. A. Luce and Thomas Edmund Jessop, “two of the twentieth century’s foremost Berkeley scholars,” thanks to whom Berkeley scholarship was raised to the rank of a special area of historico-philosophical science.

The proportion of Berkeley scholarship, in literature on the history of philosophy, is increasing. This can be judged from the most comprehensive bibliographies on George Berkeley. During the period of 1709-1932, about 300 writings on Berkeley were published. That amounted to 1½ publication per annum. During the course of 1932-79, over one thousand works were brought out, i.e. 20 works per annum. Since then, the number of publications has reached 30 per annum. In 1977 publication began in Ireland of a special journal on Berkeley’s life and thought (Berkeley Studies).