Unlike nearly all studies of Berkeley, this book looks at the full range of his work and links it with his life--focusing in particular on his religious thought. While aiming to present a clear picture of his career, Berman breaks new ground on, among other topics, Berkeley's philosophical strategy, his account of immortality, his Jacobitism, his emotive theory of religious mysteries, and the motivation of his Siris (1744). Also distinctive is the attention paid to the Irish context of his thought, his symbolic frontispieces and portraits, and recent discoveries concerning his life and...

The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher and precursor of Freud

The World as Will and Idea (1819) holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life; that the truest understanding of the world comes through art, and the only lasting good through ascetic renunciation. Unique in western philosophy for his affinity with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer influenced philosophers, writers, and composers including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett.

The Work presented here appeals not only to the...