This Is A New Release Of The Original 1908 Edition.

Excerpt from Berkeley and Spiritual Realism Spinoza and Berkeley: a coincidence. - Among modern philosophers Spinoza and Berkeley rank together in the manner of their reception. For more than a century after they died both were misinterpreted or neglected. Within the last century each in his way has become an influential factor in the excitement and formation of philosophical thought. Both tardily recognised. - Spinoza died in 1677, and for more than a hundred years after was vaguely regarded as an impious atheist, under the ban of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Berkeley died in 1753, and for a century was ridiculed as an eccentric visionary, who denied the reality of the earth on which he trod, and of the human beings by whom he was surrounded. Each now an influential philosophical factor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Berkeley is popular in the philosophical tradition as the philosopher who denied the existence of matter in favour of spiritual substance. His esse est percipi thesis is understandably seen as a recipe for subjective idealism. While there is a point to this reading of Berkeley, it remains to be seen whether it does justice to the full significance of Berkeley’s opposition to philosophical materialism. In this book, essentially a sympathetic reconstruction of Berkeley’s philosophy, Ilodigwe approaches Berkeley’s Immaterialism from the standpoint of the philosophical issues raised by the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century. He argues that when approached in this manner, Berkeley’s opposition to philosophical materialism not only emerges as an attempt to overcome false abstractions, but it also becomes possible to make sense of his claimed alliance with common sense in his battle against philosophical materialism. While the realist portrait of Berkeley that emerges from this exercise is not free from difficulties, it arguably offers us a fuller conspectus of Berkeley’s philosophy of immaterialism.