George Berkeley Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on George Berkeley

Bishop Berkeley is undoubtedly more important to the history of philosophy than to American literary and cultural history. Nevertheless, his interest in America and his influence on American thought are noteworthy. He lived for nearly three years in Newport, Rhode Island, where he wrote his attack on skepticism, Alciphron (1732). A benefactor of American education, he made significant contributions to the libraries of Yale and Harvard, and he influenced the founders of the institutions which eventually became Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. His popular "Verses by the author on the prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," which he wrote in 1716 while working on plans for a college in Bermuda and included in A Miscellany (1752), provided readers with a vision of the westward movement of civilization in which America supplants a decadent Europe as the seat of culture. Finally, his philosophical system had a modest influence upon eighteenth-century American thinkers.

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