The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 Philosophical Works, 1705-21
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~200,000 words · 965 passages
Cite this work
- APAGeorge Berkeley. (n.d.). The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 Philosophical Works, 1705-21. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/george-berkeley/the-works-of-george-berkeley-vol-1-of-4-philosophical-works-1705-21
- MLAGeorge Berkeley. "The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 Philosophical Works, 1705-21." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/george-berkeley/the-works-of-george-berkeley-vol-1-of-4-philosophical-works-1705-21.
- ChicagoGeorge Berkeley. The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4 Philosophical Works, 1705-21. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/george-berkeley/the-works-of-george-berkeley-vol-1-of-4-philosophical-works-1705-21.
What it is about
The first volume of Berkeley's works: the early philosophical writings, among them the Principles of Human Knowledge and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Context and history
The thesis is that to be is to be perceived, and that matter understood as a substance behind perceptions means nothing at all. Berkeley did not deny that things exist: he denied that anything exists beyond what is perceived. He published the Principles at twenty-five and, finding himself misunderstood, rewrote the argument as a dialogue three years later. The division into four volumes is the editor's, not Berkeley's, who published these books separately.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
COMMONPLACE BOOK. MATHEMATICAL, ETHICAL, PHYSICAL, AND METAPHYSICAL Written At Trinity College, Dublin, In 1705-8 _First published in 1871_ Editor’s Preface To The Commonplace Book Berkeley’s juvenile _Commonplace Book_ is a small quarto volume, in his handwriting, found among the Berkeley manuscripts in possession of the late Archdeacon Rose. It was first published in 1871, in my edition of Berkeley’s Works. It consists of occasional thoughts, mathematical, physical, ethical, and metaphysical, set down in miscellaneous fashion, for private use, as they arose in the course of his studies at Trinity College, Dublin. They are full of the fervid enthusiasm that was natural to him, and of sanguine expectations of the issue of the prospective authorship for which they record preparations. On the title-page is written, “G. B. Trin. Dub. alum.,” with the date 1705, when he was twenty years of age. The entries are the gradual accumulation of the next three years, in one of which the _Arithmetica_ and the _Miscellanea Mathematica_ made their appearance. The _New Theory of Vision_, given to the world in 1709, was evidently much in his mind, as well as the sublime conception of the material world in its necessary subordination to the spiritual world, of which he delivered himself in his book of _Principles_, in 1710. This disclosure of Berkeley’s thoughts about things, in the years preceding the publication of his first essays, is indeed a precious record of the initial struggles of ardent philosophical genius. It places the reader in intimate companionship with him when he was beginning to awake into intellectual and spiritual life. We hear him soliloquising. We see him trying to translate into reasonableness our crude inherited beliefs about the material world and the natural order of the universe, self-conscious personality, and the Universal Power or Providence—all under the sway of a new determining Principle which was taking profound possessi
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