George Berkeley Alciphron in Focus

The only available separate edition of Berkeley’s text, this volume contains the four most important dialogues together with essays and commentaries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Alciphron is Berkeley’s most sustained work of philosophical theology. In it, he develops one of the last great philosophical defences of religion as well as a shrewd account of the rise and nature of deism and atheism. It contains Berkeley’s final views on meaning and language, some of which (as Antony Flew argues in his essay) anticipate those of Wittgenstein. The essays and commentaries reflect the critical response to Alciphron from the time of its publication in 1732 to the present day, placing the work in critical context, and thus assisting readers to evaluate its theoretical and historical importance. In the introduction, David Berman shows that Alciphron has a closer connection with Berkeley’s Immaterialist philosophy than is generally thought.

The volume will interest students of philosophy, particularly those concerned with philosophy of religion and language. It will also appeal to readers interested in religious studies and intellectual history.

David Berman is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. His publications include A History of Atheism: From Hobbes to Russell (1990) and a number of works on Berkeley. He is editor of the Berkeley Newsletter.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mr Vincent Denard for providing translations and references for Berkeley’s Greek and Latin quotations, and to Mr Finbar Christobal for help in collating the text.

Antony Flew’s ‘Was Berkeley a precursor of Wittgenstein?’ is reprinted from W.B.Todd (ed.), Hume and the Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner, Edinburgh, The University Press, 1974. J.O.Urmson’s ‘Berkeley on Beauty’ is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, from John Foster and Howard Robinson (eds), Essays on George Berkeley, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985. A.David Kline’s ‘Berkeley’s Divine Language argument’ is reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers, from E.Sosa (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley, © 1987 by D.Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.D.Berman’s ‘Cognitive theology and emotive mysteries in Berkeley’s Alciphron’ is abridged and reprinted from Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 81, C, no. 7, 1981.