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).
Read more about this topic: George Berkeley
Famous quotes containing the words place in, place, history and/or philosophy:
“They talk about a woman’s sphere,
As though it had a limit.
There’s not a place in earth or heaven.
There’s not a task to mankind given ...
Without a woman in it.”
—Kate Field (1838–1896)
“When, said Mr. Phillips, he communicated to a New Bedford audience, the other day, his purpose of writing his life, and telling his name, and the name of his master, and the place he ran from, the murmur ran round the room, and was anxiously whispered by the sons of the Pilgrims, “He had better not!” and it was echoed under the shadow of the Concord monument, “He had better not!””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)