In this comprehensive biography, Tom Jones deals with a thinker of the Enlightenment who unites numerous contradictions. In particular, George Berkeley was both a sensualist and a speculative metaphysician. He has entered intellectual history as the ‘good bishop’. Berkeley advocated slavery, although he was a convinced philanthropist. In his intellectual development, he changed from a pronounced empiricist in his early days to a resolute Platonist in his late work, Siris. The biography comprises of 17 chapters. In the Anglo-Saxon debate, Berkeley is still interpreted as Hume’s forerunner. Jones wants to counteract this narrative by emphasising Berkeley’s originality and independence. To this end, the author draws on all of Berkeley’s works, letters and documents.

Berkeley’s versatile talents, which extended far beyond philosophy, are already manifest in the early Philosophical Notebook (1707/1708). This work was not published in his lifetime. In the Philosophical Notebook, Berkeley already dealt with ‘logic, metaphysics, optics, and mathematics’ (83). In his ingenious early and main work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), he ruthlessly exposed the aporias of Locke’s materialism and image theory. An eminent strength of the biography is that all the stages of Berkeley’s life are not only reviewed and reconstructed, but also contextualised with his evolution of thought. Jones traces Berkeley’s life from his early years as a student at Trinity College Dublin and his European travels to France and Italy, which began in 1713. Jones highlights Berkeley’s attempt to found a missionary school in Bermuda from 1728 to 1731. He pays particular attention to Berkeley’s time as Bishop of Cloyne. Berkeley took up this office in 1734 and exercised it conscientiously and with great care until his death in 1753. By including letters from family members devoted to a characterisation of Berkeley, Jones creates a vivid portrait of the Irish bishop. Jones also brings into play previously unknown aspects of Berkeley’s worldview. For instance, he unfolds Berkeley’s views on ‘discipline’ (391–436), ‘luxury and the arts’ (480–484), or ‘love and marriage’ (284–307).

As Jones already points out in the third chapter (‘Immaterialism’, 79–117), Berkeley is often reduced to the classifications of solipsist, subjective idealist, constructivist or sceptic. Jones ventures a deeper look that reveals the development and thematic range of Berkeley’s thought. Berkeley’s well-known maxim is: ‘Esse est percipi’. For Berkeley, this means that the being of things consists in their being perceived. Berkeley already refers to this dictum as the ‘immaterial hypothesis’ in his Philosophical Notebook. Jones concentrates on immaterialism at length. He is able to demonstrate that Berkeley by no means dissolves the existence of things into a deceptive system of ephemeral ideas. According to Jones, Berkeley instead wants to reconcile idealism and realism (cf. 107). Berkeley underlines that the world is exactly as we perceive it (realism), but only exists if and as long as it is perceived by finite or infinite minds (idealism).

With regard to Berkeley’s work history, it should be positively mentioned that Jones discusses the late work, Siris (1744), which is still underestimated in most research. Even Jones describes it as an expression of ‘Eclectic Philosophy’ (490–499) that unites Plato, Aristotle and Neoplatonism. It deserves consideration that Berkeley assumes the existence of Platonic ideas in Siris. For the young Berkeley of the Principles, the Platonic forms are still empty abstractions without a correspondence of meaning. As Jones clearly elaborates, the Neoplatonism of the Siris represents a radical change within Berkeley’s immaterialism (cf. 497).

Another merit of the biography is that Jones addresses one of the key questions of philosophical-historical research on Berkeley in the second (Birth to the New Doctrine, 28–78), eleventh (Alciphron, 359–378) and twelfth (The True End of Speech, 379–390) chapters; it concerns the problem of God’s function in Berkeley’s idealistic ontology. After all, Berkeley was an Anglican bishop and explicitly directed his writings against atheists and freethinkers. Therefore, that Berkeley presupposed the existence of God is an obvious thesis to propound. Berkeley frequently associates the regular sequence of ideas with the attributes of God’s wisdom and goodness. On the surface, the Irish bishop simply derives perceived ideas from a personal, divine will. But as Jones makes plausible, Berkeley develops a completely new and unique epistemological proof of God. Using the work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), Jones illustrates that Berkeley infers the existence of an infinite spirit from the instability and mind dependence of ideas. As Berkeley shows, the ideas of sense cannot exist from, and through themselves. In the process, all supposedly material objects are interpreted as ideas of sense. Berkeley adds to this the passivity of the human mind in sensory perception. This fact confronts the individual with the undeniable experience of not being the author of the things perceived. Because this can be transferred by analogy to all finite minds, there must be an infinite spirit that produces the sense ideas (cf. 14–22).

Building on this, Jones proposes that Berkeley sought to establish the argument for a higher spiritual entity by way of a reason-based inference: if this spirit can be identified without contradiction with a personal God, it follows logically that metaphysics and theology, reason and religion, are not to be located in disparate dimensions. As the quintessence of the biography we can state that this harmonious unification of disciplines occurred in Berkeley’s thinking for perhaps the last time in European intellectual history. After Berkeley’s death in 1753, not only the triumphant advance of the natural sciences was to begin, the process of secularisation and the separation of philosophy and religion continued inexorably. All in all, Jones’s biography fills an essential research gap, for until now there has been no comparably in-depth study of the connection between Berkeley’s life and his thought. Written in a fluent style and with a remarkable knowledge, Jones’ biography can be strongly recommended to anyone interested in Berkeley.