A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley by John Russell Roberts

Abstract

49 his Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State.’’2 The latter’s premature death on February 16,3 helps date the incident in the winter of 1720–1721. Factual or fictional, the adventure had little effect on George’s fondness for masquerades . On March 18, 1721, he offered a present of £500 to Heidegger,4 by then widely known as ‘‘Director of the King’s Balls.’’5 Although protests from the clergy eventually forced the temporary suspension of masquerades,6 Heidegger soon replaced them with ridottos (‘‘a mask’d Masquerade’’7 ), which once again were ‘‘By’ th’ Court approv’d of, by the K[ing] protected.’’8 1 Horace Walpole, Reminiscences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), p. 29. 2 The Present State of the British Court (London: A. Bell et al., 1720), p. 3. 3 The Daily Courant, no. 6030, Friday February 17, 1721. Horace Walpole relates that he ‘‘caught his death by calling at the gate of Lady March, who was ill of the smallpox, & being told so by the Porter, went home directly, fell ill of the same distemper & died’’ (Reminiscences , p. 36). 4 Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955), p. 124. 5 [John Macky], A Journey through England, 2nd ed. (London: J. Hooke, 1722), p. 68. 6 Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics & Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1926), pp. 187–192. 7 The Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, no. 191, Saturday June 3, 1732. 8 Moses Statute, Ridotto: Or, Downfall of Masquerades (London: A. Moore, 1723), p. 11. Stanford University BOOK REVIEWS JOHN RUSSELL ROBERTS. A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley. New York: Oxford, 2007. Pp. xxii ⫹ 172. $65. The Berkeleyan injunction to ‘‘Speak with the vulgar, but think with the learned’’ was never more faithfully executed than by Mr. Roberts in this little gem of a book, brimming with original insights yet written with clarity and elegance. Its pleasing style belies the difficulty of the material and complexity of his argument. For the practicing philosopher, it is destined to become a standard reference concerning Berkeley scholarship and the early modern period. For the literary scholar or casual philosopher, abundant connections link Berkeley and figures from St. Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and Malebranche, through Hume and Kant, to such contemporary thinkers as Wilfred Sellars and Daniel Dennett. The author constantly attends to contextual issues, placing Berkeley within the dialectic of the times, whether Berkeley’s or our own, and he brings out important themes, including semantic theory, frequently missed by hastier readers and commentators. For generations of students, Berkeley has proven a hard nut to crack. His arguments , on their face outrageous, yet strangely compelling, have won many admirers 50 but few converts, an ironic turn for a man of the cloth committed to the proposition that faith is an essential and necessary condition for both knowledge and action. Mr. Roberts tackles this paradox with verve and wit and an admirable determination to be true to his subject and not turn him into a closet dualist, a religious faker, or a hopelessly deluded religious zealot more appropriately remembered for the popular success of his treatise on the medicinal uses of tar water. Kant, whose Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was written largely to distinguish his own ‘‘transcendental idealism’’ from the ‘‘Visionary Idealism’’ he ascribed to Berkeley (and which critics of his Critique of Pure Reason had ascribed to him), stands as an egregious example of ‘‘running from one’s own philosophical shadow’’ and shows just how poisonous Berkeley’s philosophical reputation had become. Mr. Roberts’s argumentative strategy is to face Berkeley’s critics head-on only after carefully preparing the ground. He develops the necessary interpretive tools in the first four chapters, applies them to a particular problem in Berkeley scholarship in Chapter Five, and returns to the theme adumbrated in the title: reconciling Berkeley’s mature philosophical position with vulgar common sense. The first chapter addresses the suspicion that Berkeley is a closet dualist who simply replicates the Cartesian ontology of two distinct and discrete simple substances within the realm of the ‘‘mental.’’ Instead of mind and matter...