Tom Jones

The first study dedicated to the relationship between Alexander Pope and George Berkeley, this book undertakes a comparative reading of their work on the visual environment, economics and providence, challenging current ideas of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in early eighteenth-century Britain. It shows how Berkeley's idea that the phenomenal world is the language of God, learnt through custom and experience, can help to explain some of Pope's conservative sceptical arguments, and also his virtuoso poetic techniques.

In Time and Free Will, Bergson understands sensation to be the frontline of an encroachment of the forms of the external world upon duration. With his method of intuition, he seeks to liberate the dynamic powers of consciousness from this incursion. The driving question of this article is the following: In his attempt to reclaim sensation for duration by driving extensity from it, has he not gone too far, effectively alienating man from his own suffering body? In the maturation of his thought Bergson realized just this. In Matter and Memory he concedes that sensation is ”vaguely’ extended. His task shifts from purifying sensation of the intrusion of extensity, to showing that, like concrete perception, sensation is an alloy of both matter and duration. The broad goal of this article is to trace the development of Bergson’s concept of sensation between these two books, paying especially close attention to the specific sensation of pain. We will discover that this concept is improved from the early work of Time and Free Will to the later work Matter and Memory, if only because he concedes that sensation is genuinely alloyed with something that is not immediately subject to a synthesis of durational consciousness. He thus restores a certain externality to sensation, which is necessary to account for excruciating pain.

In George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. From his early brilliance as a student and fellow at Trinity College Dublin to his later years as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley brought his searching and powerful intellect to bear on the full range of eighteenth-century thought and experience. Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley’s life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without any physical substance underlying them. But he put forward this counterintuitive philosophy in support of the existence and ultimate sovereignty of God. Berkeley was an energetic social reformer, deeply interested in educational and economic improvement, including for the indigenous peoples of North America, yet he believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy and defended slavery. And although he spent much of his life in Ireland, he followed his time at Trinity with years of travel that took him to London, Italy, and New England, where he spent two years trying to establish a university for Bermuda, before returning to Ireland to take up an Anglican bishopric in a predominantly Catholic country. Jones draws on the full range of Berkeley’s writings, from philosophical treatises to personal letters and journals, to probe the deep connections between his life and work. The result is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of a major Enlightenment thinker and the world in which he lived.