Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS $0 5 David Berman. George Ber~ley: Idealism anti the Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.00. Professor Berman's focus on Berkeley is more on "the Man" than on the metaphysics and this engaging study will therefore be of greater value to those with a historical, rather than a philosophical, interest in the good bishop. The book is aptly subtitled, particularly if we understand 'idealism' in its first, or Platonic sense ("of or relating to ideals"), rather than just in the peculiarly Berkeleyan metaphysical sense. The first three of its eight chapters deal with Berkeley's metaphysics, but the bulk of the book is concerned with extraphilosophical events in Berkeley's life, in particular with the two most significant ones: the abortive Bermuda Project and the messianic, indeed almost mystical, devotion to tar-water as a medical panacea. One of the great virtues of Berman's book is that it ties together the three periods of Berkeley's career--"each marked by an idealistic cause or crusade" (71)--linking them thematically to a single event of both philosophical and biographical importance. The event was Berkeley's confrontation with several powerful clergymen upon delivering a short paper "Of Infinities" to the Dublin Philosophical Society on 19 November 17o7 . The evidence for this confrontation is almost entirely indirect, but Berman's argument is persuasive that Berkeley provoked the enmity of William King, the Archbishop of Dublin, as well as Peter Browne, the Provost of Trinity College. Among other things, Berman maintains that this explains Berkeley's notebook memo (entry #715): "To use utmost Caution not to give the least Handle to offence to the Church or Church-men." Berkeley's caution was prescient but tardy: the confrontation played a role (along with suspicions of Jacobitism) in dooming his 1716 prospects for the church preferment of St. Paul's in Dublin and was costly in other ways as well. On the positive side, however, it precipitated the "abandonment of [Locke's] cognitive theory that all significant words stand for ideas" (13). The semantic theory that emerged--Berman refers to it as a "semantic revolution"--became the underpinning, along with other features of Berkeley's philosophical system (e.g., his theory of vision as an optic language), for his philosophical theology, and especially for his careful and detailed attempts, in Alciphron 0734), to meet the challenges of the "free thinkers." While Berman is not uncritical of Berkeley's defense of religion, he makes a compelling case that it "was a magnificent achievement, possibly the last great and creative theological synthesis" (159). The third period of Berkeley's career, from 1735 to his death in 1753 , is marked prominently by his advocacy, in Siris (1744), of tar-water as a universal medicine. Berman describes the work as "a tangled chain of medicine, chemistry, philosophy of science, mythology, philosophy, and theology" (173) and he admirably elucidates the central doctrine of this difficult work as the unstated thesis-easily as astonishing as the esseest percipi doctrine of the early philosophical period-that "tar-water is the closest natural thing to drinkable God" (173) . Drawing on Berkeley's frontispieces and portraits and paying close attention the the Irish context of his thought, Berman links Berkeley's favorite metaphor of the fountain of living waters to the project of Siris. His examination is rewarding, not only as an 306 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL ~996 exposition of Siris but also in the way he is able to tie it thematically to the earlier periods of Berkeley's life. Much of the content of this book has already appeared in articles published by Berman within the past twenty-odd years. Yet, since some this material resides in journals difficult of access without an excellent library, the volume is a welcome addition to the Berkeley literature. In the enormous wake of his mentor, A. A. Luce, Berman has carefully and skillfully plotted his own course, presenting us with a balanced and compelling account of Ireland's greatest philosopher, one in which the man is a more sympathetic and fallible figure that that presented in either Luce's portrait of...