Who Were the Sea Peoples?

From a working paper (and a very hard-working one too, I might add): ***************************************** Bertrand Russell devotes a chapter of his History of Western Philosophy to Berkeley . After a generally accurate discussion of the role of God in Berkeley’s metaphysics, he claims: “If there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes.” (1945: 647) But this is absurd: for Berkeley, without God, there would simply be no “material” objects (or other beings to see their jerky existence, for that matter). What characterizes something for Berkeley as being a part of the physical world is that it has existence not just in a human mind, but in the mind of God: that is what gives it its solidity, its ineleuctable character. Russell goes on to discuss Berkeley’s “argument ...

I picked this book up at a used bookstore chiefly because of the chapter on Berkeley, but I have been perusing other sections as well. The book is somewhat infamous in its ahistorical approach to the history of philosophy. George Boas said of it: " A History of Western Philosophy errs consistently in this respect. Its author never seems to be able to make up his mind whether he is writing history or polemic.... [Its method] confers on philosophers who are dead and gone a kind of false contemporaneity which may make them seem important to the uninitiate. But nevertheless it is a misreading of history." In other words, Russell failed to place the ideas of past philosophers in their historical context, a significant flaw in many interpretations of Berkeley (as my forthcoming paper points out), and certainly a major failing in a book with "history" in its title. While flipping through it, I found this little gem: "In the general decay of civilization that...