Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"
"What Jones has revealed is the fascinating combination of chaos and coherence laced through Berkeley’s life."
---Alex Dean, Prospect Magazine"[Tom] Jones…presents Berkeley’s life through his voluminous writings, the views of his friends and family, and the opinions of those who encountered him and his writings. The result is a big book, packed with quotations from Berkeley’s works, excerpts from letters, records of journeys and activities , and details about Berkeley’s social an personal life and the people in it. Reading it requires stamina, but the rewards is a better acquaintance with a man who, as the subtitle of the book indicates, lived a life under the influence of his philosophy."
---Janna Thompson, Australian Book Review"Tom Jones has written a superb biography about the mind of a reactionary, a powerful thinker whose curiosity about the world was shaped by his religious and political conservatism."
---Sean Sheehan, Prisma"There is so much to like about Tom Jones’s George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life. This new biography is an impressive effort to unearth the whole man: Jones leaves no page unturned, no sermon unsummarized, no piece of Berkelean writing, however obscure, unrevisited. . . . this monumental work will likely remain
the book on Berkeley for some time."
---Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement"Magisterial."
---David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer"Jones’ book is a product of titanic labor and meets the highest standards of intellectual biography. Jones suggests new interpretations of some of Berkeley’s thoughts and notes, finds new biographical materials, and offers a comprehensive approach to the whole body of Berkeley’s thought."
---Artem Besedin, Berkeley Studies"Jones’s biography could not have arrived at a better time, just as public debates on the active participation of Irish people in empire and the slave trade proliferate and intensify. . . . It is easy to “de-commemorate” a thinker . . . it is much more difficult to critically engage with their thought and to gauge their influence, all while remaining conscious of their shortcomings. In this, as in much else, Jones provides a model."
---Adam Coleman, Dublin Review of Books"Scholars in early modern philosophy and intellectual history, and of course Berkeley scholars, will welcome the book."
---Takaharu Oda, Eighteenth Century Ireland
