George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish philosopher and Church of England clergyman and later a bishop. He claimed that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions — a view that would influence Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Berkeley was always interested in educational schemes. For three years, he settled on a plantation near Newport, Rhode Island, hoping to raise money to found a college in Bermuda. When this failed, he gave the money he collected to Harvard and Yale to build up their libraries. He then returned to Ireland where he was instrumental in building up Trinity College in Dublin. Berkeley, California, is named after him. (Source: Notes of the Standing Liturgical Commission)
Joseph Butler (1692-1752) was also a Church of England priest and bishop. In 1726 he published Fifteen Sermons, preached at the Rolls Chapel in London, and chiefly dealing with human nature and its implications for ethics and practical Christian life. He maintained that it is normal for a man to have an instinct of self-interest, which leads him to seek his own good, and equally normal for him to have an instinct of benevolence, which leads him to seek the good of others individually and generally, and that the two aims do not in fact conflict. He served as parish priest in several parishes, and in 1736 was appointed chaplain to Queen Caroline, wife of King George II. In the same year he published his masterpiece, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, To the Constitution and Course of Nature (often cited simply as Butler’s Analogy), a work chiefly directed against Deism. Appended to the main work was a treatise, Of the Nature of Virtue, which establishes him as one of the foremost British writers on ethics, or moral philosophy. When the Queen died in 1737, Butler was made Bishop of Bristol. However, George II had been impressed with him earlier, and in 1746 he was called back to court and the next year offered the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. He refused the post, but in 1750 he became Bishop of Durham. He died there on June 16, 1752. (Source: James Kiefer)