Was Berkeley a Precursor of Wittgenstein?

Certainly it is altogether appropriate that a contribution to a volume in honour of Ernest Mossner should start from Hume. Yet it is surely no less appropriate that the discussion should then proceed to another great figure of the same century, and that it should relate to questions of continuing contemporary relevance. I start with Hume’s acknowledgements to Berkeley, offered first near the beginning of the Treatise and again in the first Enquiry. I then go on to defend at length my own earlier hints that Hume’s account here of what he owes to Berkeley significantly understates the scope and nature of the lesson which Berkeley had to teach. In a nutshell the story is that in the Alciphron, first published in 1732 with a second edition in the same year, Berkeley said things about meaning which make him a precursor of Wittgenstein; and that Hume, even if he did study this dialogue thoroughly, ¹ was not ready to appreciate so radical a challenge to a fundamental of Locke’s new way of ideas. This conclusion does perhaps very slightly diminish Hume. But Berkeley himself seems not to have seen that the innovations of the Alciphron may call for some rethinking of his own most characteristic positions; while even two centuries later Wittgenstein—no doubt for reasons of a different kind—appears never to have recognized Berkeley as a partial precursor.