The Works of George Berkeley (Continuum Classic Texts) (4 Volume Set) [Paperback]

George Berkeley (Author), A. C. Fraser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0826488145 | ISBN-13: 978-0826488145

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works.

Product Details

• Paperback: 2070 pages
• Publisher: Thoemmes Continuum (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826488145
• ISBN-13: 978-0826488145
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 4.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,307,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Collection, December 19, 1999

By 

Bowen Simmons (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Works of George Berkeley (Major works) (Hardcover)

So what do you get for your money?

Volume I:

Life of Berkeley - by Fraser.

Commonplace Book - Berkeley's notes from 1705-08.

An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

A Treatise Concerning the Principals of Human Knowledge [Part I].

Three Dialogs Between Hylas and Philonous.

De Motu - this is in Latin and is NOT translated.

Volume II:

Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher.

The Theory of Vsion, or Visual Language, Shewing the Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity.

Volume III:

The Analyst; or a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathemetician.

A Defense of Free-Thinking in Mathematics.

Reasons for not Replying to Mr. Walton's Full Answer.

Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water and Divers Other Subjects Connected Together and Rising From One Another.

Three Letters to Thomas Prior, Esq., and a Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hales, on the Virtues of Tar-Water.

Farther Thoughts on Tar-Water.

Volume IV:

Arithmetica Absque Algebra Aut Euclide Demonstrata - this is in Latin and is NOT translated.

Miscella Mathematica... - this is in Latin and is NOT translated.

Description of the Cave of Dunmore.

The Revelation of Life and Immortality.

Passive Obedience: or The Christian Doctrine of not resisting the Supreme Power...

Essays in the Guardian.

Two Sermons Preached at Leghorn in 1714.

Journal in Italy in 1717, 1718.

An Essay Toward Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.

Notes of Sermons Preached at Newport in Rhode Island and in the Narragansett country in 1729-31.

A Sermon Preached before the Incorporating Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts...1732.

The Querist, containing several queries, proposed to the consideration of the public.

A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority.

Primary Visitation Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Cloyne.

Address on Confirmation.

A Letter to Sir John James, Bart., on the Differences Between the Roman and Anglican Churches.

Two Letters on the Occasion of the Rebellion in 1745.

A Word to the Wise: or, an Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland.

Maxims Concerning Patriotism.

Appendix: The First Edition of the Querist.

General Comments:

The books are very well produced. Cloth bound, acid-free paper, burgundy colored, with a simple and elegant design. All in all, this is a handsome edition that will physically grace your library.

Fraser's commentary and footnotes are helpful and abundant (note: this is a reprint of a 1901 work, so there is of course no commentary on how Berkeley has been read in this century).

The only thing I would have wanted different than what I got would have been translations of the Latin essays into English.

Insofar as Berkeley the philosopher, he is one of the major philosophers of history, and one of the clearest writers. He is also often scathingly funny.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's all of Berkeley - what more can you ask?, November 8, 2000

By 

Bowen Simmons (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Works of George Berkeley (Major works) (Hardcover)

Since Berkeley is best remembered as a philosopher and it is therefore highly likely that anyone interested in this is interested in that part of Berkeley's collected works, that is where I will focus this review.

The most important work of Berkeley is "A Treatise Concerning the Principals of Human Knowledge [Part I]" (there is no part II - the partial manuscript for it was lost while Berkeley was travelling). "Principals" has two principal sections: one epistemological and the other metaphysical.

In the epistemological section of "Principals", Berkeley argued that when we use words to describe entities which we literally cannot imagine, we block our own understanding - "that we have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see." We can use words to stand for a multiplicity of different entities (such as "triangle" to stand for all possible triangles), but that an abstract triangle, one that is "neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once", (here he was quoting Locke) is an impossibility. The significance of this is subtle, but critical to his argument since he came back to it again and again throughout his works to differentiate between meaningful and meaningless words.

Having laid out a differentiation between meaningful and meaningless words in his epistemological section, Berkeley then proceeded to the metaphysical section, in which he attacked the idea of matter, principally as expounded by Locke. Berkeley argued that matter is a meaningless word, signifying nothing that we can imagine. He argued that all of the properties that materialists ascribe to matter are either perceptions (non-existent in the absence of a perceiver) or utterly meaningless. Thus, Berkeley argued that a theory of matter to account for our perceptions was a meaningless proposition. Our perceptions of the world (our ideas of it), however, still required an explanation. To this end, Berkeley argued the things we perceive are ideas that are put into our minds by God. They differ from things that we imagine by our lack of control over them, and in their consistency and vividness - properties that are the result of their being the product of a mind other than and vastly more powerful than our own. In this argument, Berkeley felt that he had discovered a powerful counter to atheism, that his theistic idealism could account for the world whereas atheism, with its dependency on matter, could not.

"Principals" did not meet with the acceptance that Berkeley had hoped for it (to say the least), so he presented his metaphysics again in a more accessible form in "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous." "Dialogs" is easier to read, but not as good a source as "Principals" for really understanding Berkeley. In either form, the critical side of his argument against matter had and has great force, even if his proposed alternative has never attracted many adherents.

Berkeley also presented his metaphysics again in less detail in two other works: the fourth dialogue in "Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher" and in "The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language, Shewing the Immediate Presence and Providence of a Deity."

"Commonplace Book - Berkeley's notes from 1705-08." is a collection of short notes that Berkeley jotted down while he was working through his philosophical ideas and preparing to publish them. "Commonplace Book" itself was never intended for publication but is of interest in understanding how Berkeley's thought developed.

Berkeley also wrote on scientific matters, consistent with his views as laid out in "Principals", on vision in "An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision", (which he actually wrote before "Principals" which he hoped would soften the audience for the presentation of the full theory in "Principals" and also in "De Motu" (On Motion).

Berkeley also wrote on mathematics, again consistently with his philosophical writings in "The Analyst; or a Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician" and the follow-on works "A Defense of Free-Thinking in Mathematics" and "Reasons for not Replying to Mr. Walton's Full Answer". "The Analyst" - an attack on the foundations of Newton's calculus, set off a furor in British mathematics that lasted a century.

"Alciphron" alluded to earlier, was a work of Christian apologetics, and was Berkeley's longest work. It is not without interest today, but it has not aged as well as his other works mentioned above.

"Passive Obedience: or The Christian Doctrine of not resisting the Supreme Power", was a work of political philosophy. It is not at all connected with his other philosophical works and was regarded as dangerous and somewhat subversive.

The last work of Berkeley that deserves individual mention is "Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water and Divers Other Subjects Connected Together and Rising From One Another", a curious (to put it mildly) work on both "tar-water", which Berkeley held to be a panacea, and metaphysical speculation inspired by reading classical sources (if you don't know what tar-water is, don't worry - you can get the recipe in "Siris"). "Siris" was written near the end of Berkeley's life. The metaphysical speculation in it did not constitute an abandonment of his earlier ideas, but it did not strike me as at all developed - he was going somewhere new but had not yet arrived when he wrote it.

Apart from his intellectual endeavors above, Berkeley also led a full life and was an active Anglican clergyman. He travelled, wrote on purely religious matters, and also wrote in support of social justice and tolerance. These works round out the man, as does "Life of Berkeley", Fraser's biographical essay at the start of the collection.

The collection is not without its flaws. Chief among these is that "De Motu" is left in Latin and untranslated both it and "The Analyst" really require more extensive introductions to be easily understood by a contemporary reader. Douglas Jesseph's "De Motu and The Analyst", Volume 41 of "The New Syntheses Historical Library" is a highly recommended supplement to the "Works".

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Intelligent, December 20, 2005

By 

Book Lover - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Works of George Berkeley Part One (Paperback)

An influential writer of philosophy and just about everything else. These complete works are an essential component to any thinking person's library. I highly recommend this collection.