Abstract
It may seem strange to discuss Berkeley’s role in the history of scepticism, when he (or his spokesperson, Hylas) proclaimed that he was the furthest from scepticism of any of the philosophers of his time. Forty years ago in my article in the Review of Metaphysics, entitled “Berkeley and Pyrrhonism”,1 I offered the view that Berkeley saw himself as the one who could overcome the sceptical challenge that was rampant at his time, following a century and half of modern sceptical presentations, that took place after the rediscovery of the texts of Sextus Empiricus, and culminating in the publication of the very popular Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle in 1697 and 1702. Bayle had drawn together many, many sceptical arguments, added new ones, and applied them to various issues in seventeenth century philosophy, science and theology up to the contributions of Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke and Newton.
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Notes
R.H. Popkin, “Berkeley and Pyrrhonism”, Review of Metaphysics, 5:1951.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Harry M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism 1710–1733, The Hague;-Nijhoff, 1965, p. 20.
Bracken, op. cit., p. 21.
Andrew Michael Ramsay, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, Glasgow 1748, Book III, p. 280. Berkeley is discussed and criticized from p. 198 onward. At the end of Book III, Ramsay offered Cor.I, “Hence it is absolutely false that the existence of matter is neither probable, nor possible”. Ramsay is a most interesting figure who has hardly been studied. He was David Hume’s patron when Hume arrived in France to write his Treatise. Ramsay at the time was writing the Philosophical Principles and may have shared some of his strange views with Hume. Certainly Hume’s odd discussion of Spinoza’s philosophy seems to derive from Ramsay.
J.C. Eschenbach, Sammlung der vornehmsten Schriftsteller die Würklichkeit ihres eignem Körperwelt läugnen, Rostock, 1756. According to T.E. Jessop, this German edition was translated from the French of 1750 rather than from the original English.
Jean Pierre de Crousaz, Examen du Pyrrhonisme, The Hague: 1733, p. 97.
Harry M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley, by Richard H. Popkin.
Ibid.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Launay, Paris:Editions de Seuil, 1971, II, p. 66.
Rousseau, Oeuvres, III, p. 322.
Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, p. 36.
Giorgio Tonelli, “Pierre-Jacques Changeux and Scepticism in the French Enlightenment”, Studia Leibnitiana, 55:1974, 106–126.
Richard H. Popkin, “Scepticism in the Enlightenment”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteeneth Century 26, 1963, 1321–1345.
Tonelli, “Pierre-Jacques Changeux and Scepticism in the French Enlightenment”, p. 118. 16. Ibid., 112.
Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, art. “Corps”.
D’Alembert. “sens”, Encyclopédie, Vol. 15, pp. 16–34.
Voltaire, Le Préservatif, No. XXVI.
The translations are described in T.E. Jessop, A Bibliography of George Berkeley, 2nd edition, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. Alciphron appeared in French in 1734 in both The Hague and Paris.
On Boullier and his admiration of Berkeley’s philosophy, see R.H. Popkin, “David-Renaud Boullier et l’évêque Berkeley”, Revue philosophique de la France et l’Etranger, 148:1958, pp. 364–70. Boullier said that Berkeley was one of the outstanding philosophers of the time and one of the most acute minds of the century.
The special character of Rousseau’s scepticism, which was not treated by Tonelli, is discussed in some detail by Ezequiel de Olaso in “The two scepticisms of Savoyard vicar” in R.A. Watson and James E. Force, The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy, Dordrecht:Kluwer, 1988, pp. 43–59.
Condorcet, Equisse.
Giorgo Tonelli, “The Weakness of Reason in the Enlightenment”, Diderot Studies 14:1971, pp. 217–244.
The letters were first published in 1808. They appear in Oeuvres de Turgot, edited by Gustave Schelle, Paris:Félix Alcan, 1913, Tome I, pp. 185–93. It is not completely sure who the addressee was.
Ibid, p. 189.
Ibid, p. 190.
Ibid., p. 193.
“Existence” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Paris, 1756, Tome XVI, p. 260.
Both printings were published at Neuchâtel by the Imprimerie de la Société typographique. The second edition says on the title page that it exactly conforms to the original edition.
Jean-Pierre Brissot, Pyrrhon, Paris, Archives nationales, 446/AP/21, fol. 12r.
Ibid., fol. 12v.
Ibid., fol. 19v.
Condorcet’s notes on Hume’s Treatise exist, and were used by Keith Baker in his important study of Condorcet.
On interest in Hume and in refuting him amongst members of the Berlin Academy see Lawrence Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter Revolution in France, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993; and Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Conception of “Hume’s Problem”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21, 1983, pp. 177–78, note 7.
This work of J.P.F. Ancillon appears in the 1796 issue of the Mémoires of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin.
James Beattie, Essay on the Immutability of Truth, Part II, chap, ii, 2.
Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800, Montreal:McGill-Queens University Press, 1987, p. 178.
Jessop lists this edition (#98 in Jessop’s bibliography) as Berkeley’s philosophsiche Werke, Erster Theil, aus dem Englishen übersetzt, Leipzig, 1781. The translator is unknown.
Staüdlin, op.cit., V, p. 42.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., note 125.
Staüdlin, VI. Hume to Kant and Platner, p. 3.
See the quotation from Hamann in Kuehn, op.cit., p. 227.
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Popkin, R.H. (1997). Berkeley in the History of Scepticism. In: Popkin, R.H., De Olaso, E., Tonelli, G. (eds) Scepticism in the Enlightenment. Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 152. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8953-6_10
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