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This chapter proposes a dilemma: Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas appears to require an acceptance of a Lockean-style ideational semantics. However, such a semantics would seem to undercut the viability of his central religious convictions. It would seem Berkeley can only save the latter by rejecting the former or vice-versa. The dilemma is removed by a careful examination of Berkeley's famous Introduction to the Principles. It is shown that Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas is actually based on a rejection of ideational semantics. Instead, Berkeley advocates a “use theory” of meaning. This semantic theory is then applied to the interpretation of Berkeley's divine language thesis and shown to help support a pragmatic approach to the ontology of the natural world. This interpretation is defended against competing interpretations by Jonathan Bennett and David Berman.

This chapter examines Alciphron's Letters, which portray a world of longing and loss, a world of fragile happiness and comic disillusionment. There are four books: Letters from Fishermen, Farmers, Parasites, and Courtesans. Each of those four groups reveals through its letters its own desires and sufferings, its own extravagant dreams and bathetic failures. Two themes (as far as they can be separated) are particularly prominent: precarious or failed aspiration to material gain, love, or physical comfort; and precarious or failed aspiration to social advancement or role-swapping. The second of those preoccupations leads to an impression of interconnection between the different parts of the work, in the many letters where characters express their desire to cross from membership of one group to another. The unrealistic character of the characters' dreams is matched by the inaccessibility and unreality of Alciphron's world for its readers. This chapter asks how far the text's epistolary form works to intensify its thematic obsessions, with a particular emphasis on formal issues using the work of Janet Altman as a starting-point.

This chapter suggests some ways of thinking about the epistolary genre and its development in Greek literature, focusing on some particular examples from ‘Second Sophistic’ epistolographers who built upon and added to these developments. Taking examples from fictional letters in which there seems to be no obstacle to verbal communication, this chapter argues that they do not constitute lapses in verisimilitude on the author's part; rather, such letters add variety to the imagined situations of their letter-writers, allowing the reader to reconstruct possible motives for writing where none is mentioned. The authors thus illustrate some potential advantages of the letter over verbal communication.

This chapter examines George Berkeley's thought from the standpoint of the Christian apologetic tradition. It attempts to show that the roots of Berkeley's thought could be found in this tradition. The first part of this chapter outlines the broader theoretical framework within which the discussion of Berkeley's apologetics is to be placed and looks at the special relationship that theism bears on his immaterialist philosophy. The second part suggests that his Alciphron is an example of apologetic writing.

Alciphron’s collection of 123 fictional letters recreate in miniature the world of Menandrian New Comedy. Three of these letters, however, involve a basic scenario that is reminiscent of Clouds: disputes between a father and son and, in one case, a hetaira and her lover, regarding the corrupting influence of philosophers. Language borrowed directly from Aristophanes’s play further cements this connection. In this context, Old Comedy is subsumed into a New Comic context, and Clouds emerges as a literary shorthand for denoting corrupt philosophers. Yet the epistolary format also provides Alciphron with a way to recreate the dramatic elements of the original play: his readers are given unfettered access to the characters and are asked to fill in what is left unsaid by the letter from their knowledge of Aristophanes’s play.

Berkeley’s most detailed discussion of the philosophy of language appears in Alciphron. Although Berkeley’s discussion is motivated by problems about religious language raised by John Toland, his response is not to develop a theory of religious language as a special case but rather to defend a general theory of language and show that the meaningfulness of these religious utterances is a consequence of that theory. The theory Berkeley adopts holds that words get to be meaningful when they are used according to conventional rules as part of a public social practice aiming at practical ends. Berkeley does not endorse a sharp distinction between emotive and cognitive language, but rather holds that one and the same word is typically associated with a wide variety of rules, which may instruct users not only to have ideas but also to feel emotions or perform a variety of linguistic or non-linguistic actions.