A new approach to Berkeley's philosophical notebooks

Bertil Belfrage

pp. 217-230

in: Ernest Sosa (ed), Essays on the philosophy of George Berkeley, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

All entries in the Notebooks are pieces of one and the same philosophical puzzle. (I use the term “puzzle” as it is used for the game in which several pieces are put together in order to create one coherent picture.) A. A. Luce, who was very well aware of this difficulty, sometimes spoke of “the unfairness of indiscriminate and uninformed quotation from” Berkeley’s Notebooks.1 He strongly opposed a view of the Notebooks that takes them as little more than scrapbooks of disorganized, occasional jottings; he went as far in the other direction as to look upon these entries almost as sections of a sophisticated tractatus2. But how, according to him, could incompatible entries be parts of a constructive, sober work?

Cited authors

Berkeley George