This is the first volume of essays on Berkeley's Three Dialogues, a classic of early modern philosophy. Leading experts cover all the central issues in the text: the rejection of material substance, the nature of perception and reality, the limits of human knowledge, and the perceived threats of skepticism, atheism, and immorality.

Tom Stoneham offers a clear and detailed study of Berkeley's metaphysics and epistemology, as presented in his classic work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, originally published in 1713 and still widely studied. Stoneham shows that Berkeley is an important and systematic philosopher whose work is still of relevance to philosophers today.

In the early 18th century George Berkeley made the astonishing claim that physical objects such as tables and chairs are nothing but collections of ideas. Samuel Rickless presents a new account of Berkeley's controversial argument, and suggests it is the philosopher's greatest legacy: not only is it valid, but it may well be sound.

The Socratic, or dialog, form is central to the history of philosophy and has been the discipline's canonical genre ever since. Paul Feyerabend's Three Dialogues on Knowledge resurrects the form to provide an astonishingly flexible and invigorating analysis of epistemological, ethical and metaphysical problems. He uses literary strategies - of irony, voice and distance - to make profoundly philosophical points about the epistemic, existential and political aspects of common sense and scientific knowledge. He writes about ancient and modern relativism; the authority of science; the ignorance of scientists; the nature of being; and true and false enlightenment. Throughout Three Dialogues on Knowledge is provocative, controversial and inspiring. It is, unlike most current philosophical writing, written for readers with a keen sense of what matters and why.

A landmark of enlightenment though, HUme's An Enquiry Concerning Human understanding is accompanied here by two shorter works that shed light on it: A Letter from a Gentlemen to His Friend in Edinburgh, hume's response to those accusing him of atheism, of advocating extreme scepticism, and of undermining the foundations of morality; and his Abstract of A Treatise of HUman Nature, which anticipates discussions developed in the Enquiry. In his concise Introduction, Eric Steinberg explores the conditions that led to write the Enquiry and the work's important relationship to Book 1 of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature.

Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, Georges Dicker here examines both the destructive and the constructive sides of Berkeley's thought, against the background of the mainstream views that he rejected.