Abstract
Andrew Baxter, as we have had occasion in the last chapter to note, has been regarded as the author of the first extended criticism in English of Berkeley’s philosophy,1 yet that criticism itself has received little attention.2 This chapter is devoted to an examination of the material contained in a section of Baxter’s Enquiry 3 entitled “Dean Berkeley’s scheme against the existence of matter and a material world examined, and shewn inconclusive.” The section is interesting in that it reveals to us the sort of impact Berkeley’s Principles had on a metaphysician of some ability and influence living in a world, so far as he could see, dominated on the one hand by a Malebranchian type of rationalism, on the other by Baylean Pyrrhonism, with Locke seen as leaning towards the latter. In his either/or intellectual milieu, the revolution advanced in the Principles would find no place.
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References
T. E. Jessop, A Bibliography of George Berkeley (London: 1934), entry 241.
Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (London: 1733)
Cf. John Jackson, A dissertion on Matter and spirit…with some remarks on a book entitled, An Enquiry into the Nature of the human Soul (London: 1735).
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: 1764); James Beatlie, An Essay on the.Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (Edinburgh: 1770).
See Richard H. Popkin, “L’Abbé Foucher et le problème des qualités premiéres, ” Bulletin de la Societé d’Etude du XVIIe Siècle. No. 33 (1956), 633–647. Philip Cummins, “Perpetual Relativity and Ideas in the mind” Philosophy and Phenomenological research, XXIV (1963), 202–14; Richard A. Watson, “The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, I (1963), 177–97.
See Richard A. Watson, The Downfall of cartesianism 1673–1712 (La Haye: 1965).
Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (New York: 1912), pp. 126ff.
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© 1965 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Bracken, H.M. (1965). Andrew Baxter: Critic of Berkeley. In: The Early Reception of Berkeley’s Immaterialism 1710–1733. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idees/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3567-5_5
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