Living with Berkeley
How should we deal with the legitimate wisdom produced by people with sinister personal histories? Clare Moriarty's research focuses on 18th-century philosophy and mathematics. In this talk she will consider what we can learn from Berkeley’s ideas today, while still recognising his complex legacy.
Trinity’s (erstwhile) Berkeley Library has been “de-named”. Many would have you believe that Ireland’s best-known philosopher has been cancelled. What would it mean to cancel a person, in this sense? And what's in a name anyway: the case of the TCD library was one thing, but given that UC Berkeley and the city that surrounds it are also named for George Berkeley, the stakes could have been higher.
How should we deal with legitimate wisdom produced by people with sinister personal histories: can we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Given the revelations about his past, it is easy to wonder what wisdom the doctrinaire Bishop George Berkeley has to offer to our modern lives.
In this talk, Clare will argue that there is wisdom there amid the monstrosity, and focus on two lesser-known and perhaps surprising strands of Berkeley’s philosophical writings to show how valuable his thought can still be to modernity: (i) resisting technological dogma and (ii) the domestic agriculture and fashion industries.
Date | Thursday, 3rd April 2025
Time | 7.00pm - 8.30pm
Location | The Synge Theatre, The Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Dr. Clare Moriarty
Clare is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy. Her current project is focused on mathematics and philosophy in the 18th century. Recent publications concentrate on the work of George Berkeley, Isaac Newton, Colin Maclaurin and Oliver Byrne. She is particularly interested in the application of mathematical methods to non-mathematical domains and reactions to/against such applications.