George Berkeley
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was born in Kilkenny, Ireland. He first attended Kilkenny College; then in 1700 at the age of 15, he entered Trinity College (University of Dublin), where he earned his bache- lor’s degree in 1704 at the age of 19 and his master’s degree in 1707 at the age of 22. He received ordi- nation as a deacon of the Anglican church at the age of 24 and that same year published An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709). A year later he published what was perhaps his most important work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). His third major work, Three Dia- logues Between Hylas and Philonous, was published during his first trip to England in 1713. Berkeley’s fame was firmly established by these three books before he was 30 years old. He continued at Trinity College and lectured in divinity and Greek philos- ophy until 1724, when he became involved in the founding of a new college in Bermuda intended for both native and white colonial Americans. In 1728 he sailed to Newport, Rhode Island, where he waited for funding for his project. The hoped- for government grants were not forthcoming, how- ever, and Berkeley returned to London. Berkeley’s home in Whitehall (near Newport) still stands as a museum containing artifacts of his visit to colonial America. For the last 18 years of his life, Berkeley was an Anglican bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, Ireland. He died suddenly on January 14, 1753, at Oxford, where he had been helping his son enroll as an undergraduate. Just over a hundred years later, the site of the first University of California campus was named for Bishop Berkeley.
