Description: What do we mean by causation? For George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, the answer lies not in metaphysical abstraction but in practice. This book offers the first sustained pragmatist reading of Berkeley's Latin treatise, De Motu (1721, "On Motion"). Together with an unpublished manuscript, "De Motu," newly examined at the British Library, it reveals how Berkeley's theory of mechanical causation prefigures the pragmatism of Charles Peirce. Situating Berkeley within the British and Irish philosophical traditions of Bacon and Toland, it challenges reductionist, structuralist, and instrumentalist readings and opens a fresh dialogue between early modern European philosophy and the history of science.
