Abstract

In Alciphron (1732) Berkeley engages in extensive criticism of the Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Berkeley’s criticism of the Earl is remarkably aggressive. It culminates in §§12-14 of the Third Dialogue, where Berkeley launches a vicious personal attack against Shaftesbury, under the name of ‘Cratylus’. In this way the third dialogue differs radically in tone from Berkeley’s other philosophical works and has been viewed with shock and derision. In this paper I will show that Berkeley names Shaftesbury ‘Cratylus’ because he wants to impute the kind of self-deception against the Earl that Plato vividly describes in the dialogue Cratylus. This, moreover, is the key to correctly understanding Berkeley’s argument against Shaftesbury’s moral theory, which is an attack on a pernicious form of moral subjectivism, rather than an attack on virtue ethics, as is commonly thought.