Philosophy Topics - Philosophers
Home
Why?
How?
What?
Who is JFB?
About PDF files
Rights (changed)
Original texts
Comments
What next?
Search the texts
Subscribe
Contact

Many words that are still current in English have lost meanings that they had in the 16th-18th centuries - more, indeed, than is generally recognized. A recent good edition of Berkeley’s Principles includes a glossary, but it attends only to words that are now obsolete, ignoring current ones with obsolete meanings. Its editor has agreed with me that he was wrong to omit from his glossary the following:

allege, amuse, attend, collect, described, detract, discover, evidence, harsh, ideal, image, induction, parcel, philosopher, presently, pretend, proper, received, repugnant, schools, strangely, suffer

all of which are used by Berkeley in senses very different from their current ones.

For example, he writes of ‘labyrinths of amusement’, meaning ‘labyrinths of baffled confusion’. He and others frequently use

‘pretend’ to mean ‘claim’,

‘repugnant to’ to mean ‘contradictory to’

‘discover’ to mean ‘reveal [in oneself]’

‘conscience’ to mean ‘consciousness’

and so on.

Bacon
Berkeley
Boyle
Anne Conway
Descartes
Jonathan Edwards
Hobbes
Hume
Kant
La Mettrie
Leibniz
Locke
Malebranche
Mill
Newton
Richard Price
Reid
Adam Smith
Spinoza
Copyright ©2010-2015 Jonathan Bennett - Early Modern Texts
Philosophy Texts mostly from the early modern period
Bacon | Berkeley | Boyle | Anne Conway | Descartes | Jonathan Edwards | Hobbes | Hume | Kant | La Mettrie | Leibniz | Locke | Malebranche | John Stuart Mill | Newton | Reid | Adam Smith | Spinoza