Bertil Belfrage - The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley

Other volumes in the series of Bloomsbury Companions:

Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro

Analytic Philosophy, edited by Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson

Continental Philosophy, edited by John Maoilearca and Beth Lord

Epistemology, edited by Andrew Cullison

Ethics, edited by Christian Miller

Existentialism, edited by Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds and Ashley Woodward

Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards

Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan OBrien

Hobbes, edited by S.A. Lloyd

Kant, edited by Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting and Nigel Hems

Leibniz, edited by Brandan C. Look

Locke, edited by S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley

Marx, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis and Imre Szeman

Metaphysics, edited by Robert W. Barnard and Neil A. Manson

Philosophical Logic, edited by Leon Horston and Richard Pettigrew

Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Max Kolbel

Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Garvey

Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi

Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press

Political Philosophy, edited by Andrew Fiala

Pragmatism, edited by Sami Pihlstrm

Socrates, edited by John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith

Spinoza, edited by Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop,Piet Steenbakkers and Jeroen van de Ven

Timo Airaksinen is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Bertil Belfrage became Assistant Professor (universitetslektor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Lund University, Sweden in 1970, and Research Fellow in the History of Ideas and Sciences in 1993. He was Senior Editor of Berkeley Studies in 20052007, is editing a new scholarly edition of Berkeleys works and has published numerous papers on different aspects of Berkeleys philosophy.

Talia Bettcher is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy, College of Arts and Letters, California State University, USA.

Seth Bordner is Assistant Professor Philosophy at the University of Alabama, USA.

Wolfgang Breidert was formerly professor of philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe. He has translated most of Berkeleys writings into German (198096). He is the author of George Berkeley: 16851753 (1989); Philosophen im Gedicht (2012); Philosophie in Gedichten (2013); and essays on history of mathematics, among others on Berkeley and mathematics.

Richard Brook is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, USA.

Laurence Carlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy and a member of the University Honors Faculty at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA.

Sbastien Charles is a Professor and Dean of Research at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivires, Canada.

James Van Cleve is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, USA.

Georges Dicker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the College of Brockport, State University of New York, USA.

Keota Fields is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, USA.

Richard Glauser is a Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.

Adam Grzeliski is the Director of the Institute of Philosophy at Nicholas Copernicus University, Poland.

Marc Hight is Eliot Professor of Philosophy at Hampden-Sydney College, Australia.

Tom Jones is a Reader in English, University of St. Andrews, UK.

Patrick Kelly is Professor and Fellow Emeritus of History at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

Nancy Kendrick is a Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College, USA.

Charles McCracken is Professor Emeritus Philosophy at Michigan State University, USA.

Jeff McDonough is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, USA.

Kenneth Pearce is Ussher Assistant Professor in Berkeley Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, USA.

Samuel Rickless is a Professor in the Philosophy Department of the University of California, San Diego, USA.

John Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University, USA.

Howard Robinson is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Tom Stoneham is a Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK.

Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook

George Berkeleys most famous works today are the Principles (1710) and the Three Dialogues (1713), known for his idealism and his challenging denial of matter. Ironically enough, these important works were either neglected or disregarded in Berkeleys lifetime. When rediscovered about a century after his death, they attracted a lot of interest from both realists and idealists. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the established view was that Berkeley exclusively contributed to the field of metaphysics. The editors of Berkeleys Works (194857), A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, argued in their introductions that we could, or should, neglect some of those works in which he dealt with other than metaphysical issues. Thus we read in volume one of the Works that the Theory of Vision (1709) did not represent Berkeleys own views at any stage (1:147, 14950, 156), in volume three that Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) has been left to students of philosophy quite wrongly, because he did not express his own view in this work (3:7, 13), in volume four that De Motu (1721) is a slight and disappointing work apart from the Principles the De Motu would be nonsense (4:34), et cetera. The result was that works for which Berkeley was famous in his lifetime are seldom, if ever, studied in the Anglophone world today.