ABSTRACT: If research devoted to the clandestine literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is today enjoying considerable expansion in the scholarly world, it tends, nonetheless, to be restricted to materialist considerations. However, other themes are open to exploration, such as the immaterialist one which is explicitly mentioned in two manuscripts. After presenting and analyzing these two texts, we argue that this clandestine account of immaterialism could explain both the evolution of this theory during the Enlightenment and the misunderstanding of (...) Berkeley’s philosophy. (shrink)

If research devoted to the clandestine literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is today enjoying considerable expansion in the scholarly world, it tends, nonetheless, to be restricted to materialist considerations. However, other themes are open to exploration, such as the immaterialist one which is explicitly mentioned in two manuscripts (theRéflections morales et métaphisiques sur les religions et sur les connoissances de l'hommeand theJordanus Brunus Redivivus). After presenting and analyzing these two texts, we argue that this clandestine account of immaterialism (...) could explain both the evolution of this theory during the Enlightenment and the misunderstanding of Berkeley's philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècleTodd RyanSébastien Charles. Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Geneviève Brykman. Paris: Vrin, 2003. Pp. 368. Paper, € 28,00.The reception accorded to Berkeley's immaterialism by eighteenth-century philosophers constitutes one of the great puzzles of early modern philosophy. How is it possible that Berkeley, whose announced purpose in both the Principles and (...) Three Dialogues was to refute "Skeptics and Atheists," should quickly come to be seen as the foremost champion of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and indeed of atheistic solipsism? To be sure the caricature of philosophical opponents for polemical purposes is hardly limited to Berkeley. Yet from the [End Page 495] modern point of view Berkeley, the "good Bishop" who tirelessly insisted on the consonance of immaterialism with common sense, as well as the indispensable role of God as cause of our ideas of sense, seems a rather unlikely candidate for the near universal hostility—one might even say vilification—that was to be his lot.Forty years ago Harry M. Bracken attempted to unravel this paradox in his classic study The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Through a careful and philosophically informed examination of early accounts of Berkeley's immaterialism, Bracken argued that the distorted image of Berkeley that was to become the common currency of Enlightenment thinkers had its origin in the earliest accounts of Berkeley's work, most notably a pair of reviews in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux, and a vituperative attack on "the atheism of the Immaterialists" by Father Tournemine. According to Bracken, the image of Berkeley as a radical disciple of Malebranche who pushed the Oratorian's philosophy to its logical conclusion by denying the existence of matter was promoted by the Jesuits as part of their theological and political struggle against Cartesianism. It was also in these early reviews that Berkeley's name was first associated with the legendary "egoist" philosopher who in addition to denying the existence of material substance, further claimed that his was the only created spirit in existence.Sébastien Charles's impressive new study extends Bracken's work by carefully documenting the dissemination of this distorted image of Berkeley throughout the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Charles's book is a comprehensive and impressively erudite survey of the use (and misuse) of Berkeley in the writings of the philosophes, as well as later thinkers, including the Idéologues and members of the Berlin Academy. Sadly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, the texts that Charles surveys afford little critical insight to interpreters of Berkeley. The misreadings of Berkeley are so egregious and so pervasive that the philosophy of the Principles and Three Dialogues is generally disfigured beyond recognition. Indeed, even to speak of a "misreading" of Berkeley is somewhat misleading, since many of those who took up the task of refuting immaterialism seem not to have read him at all.However, Charles's aim is much less to shed interpretive light on Berkeley's philosophy than to rectify the long-standing image of the eighteenth century as an era of unbridled epistemological optimism. Emphasizing the confrontations with radical skepticism to be found in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Rousseau and Diderot, La Mettrie and Destutt de Tracy, Charles argues that far from ignoring the threat of radical skepticism, materialists and dualists, deists and Christians made common cause in their struggle against what they took to be Berkeley's alleged "egoism." Indeed, for Charles, "the question of solipsism was the central problem for the metaphysics of the Enlightenment."The ubiquity of references to Berkeley among these thinkers certainly argues in favor of Charles's thesis. Yet the attempt to survey such a large number of authors frequently necessitates an abbreviated treatment that renders difficult the task of assessing the relative importance of the confrontation with radical skepticism in any individual thinker's system. Further, the very weakness and formulaic character of the attempted refutations might reasonably raise suspicions as to whether the threat of solipsism was taken as seriously as Charles maintains... (shrink)

Etude sur la réception de l'oeuvre de G. Berkeley (1685-1753) et de sa théorie de l'immatérialisme par les penseurs des Lumières en France, ses contemporains, disciples ou adversaires. Analyse l'interprétation au XVIIIe siècle de l'oeuvre de Berkeley comme une pensée sceptique.

Chez Berkeley, la courte vue correspond, métaphoriquement, à l'inspection minutieuse d'un objet, tandis que la vision synoptique est la contemplation de l'univers d'un point de vue qui serait celui de Dieu. Dès 1707, Berkeley déclare qu'il est « naturellement myope », en ajoutant que ce défaut le conduirait à examiner les choses et les mots de beaucoup plus près qu'il n'est nécessaire pour les autres. Ses écrits sont entièrement soustendus par une dualité entre myopie et vue synoptique mais cette dualité, (...) très présente dans l'immatérialisme stricto sensu, peut être problématique pour les desseins apologétiques de Berkeley. With Berkeley, short-sightedness is a metaphorical description of minute inspection of a definite object, whereas long -sightedness is the idealized contemplation of universe from the standpoint of God. As early as 1707, Berkeley asserts that he is "naturally short-sighted", adding that this defect may induce him to examine things and words nearer than it is necessary for other people. My aim is to show that the duality between short sightedness and long -sightedness entirely underlies Berkeley's writings. I shall exhibit that such a duality is present in Berkeley's immaterialism, as well as in his moral philosophy, producing a clash between Berkeley's own free-thinking and his apologetic concerns. (shrink)

David Raynor aborde une pluralité de thèmes chez Berkeley, qui se rapportent soit à la signification ambiguë de l'immatérialisme par rapport à la philosophie spontanée des gens ordinaires, soit au dosage savant de réalisme et d'idéalisme dans une philosophie qui élabore une critique radicale de la doctrine de l'idée-représentation. Il est intéressant de noter que Raynor ne s'en laisse pas raconter par certains interprètes classiques de la pensée berkeleyenne et qu'il sait tirer avantageusement parti d'une confrontation de Berkeley (...) avec des rationalistes tels Male-branche ou Leibniz, mais tout aussi bien d'une mise en perspective à l'intérieur du courant empiriste à partir des réflexions de Hume et de Maupertuis. (shrink)

Cet article vise à présenter une dimension peu connue de la pensée de Berkeley à travers une étude minutieuse des polémiques entretenues par ce dernier tout au long de la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Ces polémiques, dont le contenu est généralement politique, moral ou économique, reposent sur trois thèses récurrentes et complémentaires, rarement pensées de concert: une philosophie cyclique de l’histoire; une distinction ontologique entre activité et passivité appliquée à d’autres domaines que celui de la métaphysique; une analogie (...) entre monde physique et monde moral qui fonctionne au niveau du rapport entre macrocosme et microcosme. La mise en valeur de ces trois thèses permet d’envisager la philosophie berkeleyenne sous un autre angle, notamment en donnant à son immatérialisme une saveur plus stratégique qu’on ne le fait habituellement. (shrink)

Avec The First Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism, paru en 1959 et réédité par la suite en 1965, Harry M. Bracken tentait de donner une explication crédible à la transformation radicale au sein de la modernité d’une forme d’empirisme très particulière, l’immatérialisme, en pur et simple solipsisme. C’est dans cet horizon de pensée que s’inscrit l’ouvrage commun de Charles J. McCracken et de Ian C. Tipton, puisqu’il vise à rassembler des textes des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles qui «illuminate the background from (...) which Berkeley’s philosophical views emerged or illustrate the reactions those views provoked». Il s’agit donc avant tout d’un recueil de textes et non d’une analyse d’ensemble, quoique les différentes présentations mettant en contexte chacun des extraits choisis permettent de fournir une interprétation globale du travail accompli. Et ce travail se déploie sous deux champs d’analyse, dont la figure même de Berkeley marque la rupture. (shrink)