The Rhetoric of Argument in Berkeley's Siris

Abstract

Bishop Berkeley's Siris is a strange, anomalous text, an apparent lapse from his sceptical, strong-minded, and rigorous philosophy. His other works are uncluttered masterpieces of analysis and exposition, which develop their own terminology and appeal to personal introspection for verification. Siris, however, is littered with borrowings from eighteenth-century systems of chemistry and physics and from esoteric, hermetic philosophies, which underlie and shape its argument. Whereas elsewhere Berkeley sharply limits the grounds of knowledge, Siris enthusiastically advances the marvelous, mythopoeic idea of an animistic universe and treats the world as though it were the body of an animal whose every motion is directed by God. In its methods and conclusions, then, this text may strike modern readers as foreign or even bizarre, not worthy of consideration as serious philosophical discourse. Especially since the scientific theories it invokes have been disproven or superseded, its proposals may seem useless, of interest only to historians of science or philosophy. Yet I believe that in Siris Berkeley writes a self-conscious, philosophically informed discourse that is grounded in his sense of the rhetorical and ultimately supra-philosophical purposes of abstract inquiry. He uses the persuasive power that scientific argument had within his culture to develop insights that surpass the ideology and philosophy supporting eighteenth-century science. This practice is specifically informed by Berkeley's novel theories of language and of science, but its significance extends beyond his philosophy to larger issues concerning the often unacknowledged influence of rhetorical motives and strategies in scientific and philosophic texts.