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A Pragmatist Bishop: Berkeley's Philosophy of Causation
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What do we mean by causation? For George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the answer lies not in metaphysical abstraction but in practice. A Pragmatist Bishop offers the first sustained pragmatist reading of Berkeley’s Latin treatise, De Motu (1721, “On Motion”). Together with an unpublished manuscript, “De Motu,” newly examined at the British Library, this book reveals how Berkeley’s theory of mechanical causation prefigures the pragmatism of Charles Peirce. Situating Berkeley within the British and Irish philosophical traditions of Bacon and Toland, it challenges reductionist, structuralist, and instrumentalist readings and opens a fresh dialogue between early modern European philosophy and the history of science.
Takaharu Oda, Ph.D. (2022), Trinity College Dublin (Provost’s Scholar), is Associate Professor at Jiangsu University, co-editor of Irish Philosophy in the Age of Berkeley (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and recipient of a research grant from the Ministry of Education, China (2025–).
This book is of interest to professional scholars and postgraduate students in early modern European philosophy, early modern Latin writing, history and philosophy of science, pragmatism, and George Berkeley.