Trinity's Berkeley Library to be named after Eavan Boland

Do you think all the buildings that chose to remove the Slacker family name from buildings and wings of museums, art galleries etc are just steps away from destroying statues etc?

The Berkeley slavery issue only became common knowledge in the early 21st century and Trinity are perfectly entitled to rename it if they so wish. Also plenty of buildings have been renamed in their lifetime.

I genuinely would be very surprised if you're correct on that. 😂

So we should never name something after a woman, different race, colour or sexuality as it be just box ticking? Let's rename all of then inanimate objects or animals, fish or birds

I don’t think you understand what an inclusive society is all about.

….

In fairness, the Sacklers are being judged by present day standards because they live and made a fortune in the present day peddling addictive drugs to vulnerable sick people.

I see someone comparing Berkeley to Jimmy Saville now. It's amazing how casually off the wall some of this stuff can be.

1. It's not hostile towards Jewish people to demand all ties are cut. Hostile towards Israel? Yes, Jewish people on the whole. No. It is not anti-semitic.
2. Citation please.

not comparing the two at all, just trying to understand what the cut off point is. What is destroying legacy and what isn’t.

This slope is a bit slippery and it's getting steeper!

Nah, you're just being a bit hysterical.

I guess time will tell, but it already told that we're learning nothing from history.

What I'm trying to say is that people should be judged by the moral standards of the time they lived in. Despite all the failings of the people who covered up what Jimmy Saville did, nobody is saying what he did was morally acceptable at the time. Rape and sex with minors was illegal then.

I think the author of that piece in the IT (Clare Moriarty) recognises this because her main argument against Berkeley is this:

Knowing Berkeley’s thinking as intimately as I do, I find it frankly patronising to endorse the idea that a mind like his couldn’t have imagined selling, dehumanising, separating and torturing people might be wrong.

She's trying to judge him by a form of contemporaneous standard (ie doubts he might or should have been having himself), but at worst it's a crime against his own conscience, not against society as a whole, which was very much in favour of slavery in the part of the US where he lived (for four years). And the truth is we don't know exactly what his thinking was. Maybe he figured he couldn't beat the system, so he would try to be a benevolent slave owner. Who knows?

The headline of the piece was "Eavan Boland, who wrote about women’s lives, is a better fit for Trinity than slave-owning Berkeley". When you put it that way, who is going to argue against it?

I don't agree with her on why the city and university in California aren't going to change their name. I think the real reason is that the few people in Berkeley who know the origin of the name, simply don't care. They don't care what some obscure European philosopher did, who spent four years in Rhode Island before the US even came into existence.

It's remarkable that a name change to a library that 99% of people have never heard of before can turn into whatever the hell this thread is. Because woke...

Did I say that? No, I did not. I don't believe the renaming process should have been exclusionary though, which it was. I take no issue with the person chosen, their gender, their sexuality, religious beliefs. Matters not a bit. It matters though that they chose that person BECAUSE she was not a white male.

I'd happily be corrected if the short-list could be provided for all to see.

You do know that people with skin colours other than white were slave traders, don't you?

Here's a quick summary article on it. Plenty of other sources if you care to look.

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=445

1. Splitting hairs there. Nearly 80% of Israel is inhabited by Jews.
2. Already linked. Go back and read.

This defence - judge them by the standards of their day — is fairly commonly offered in debates of this kind.

There's a good reason for that in general. We don't charge people with crimes that weren't an offence at the time they were committed, I think the same should be true for judging historical figures.

The fact of teh matter is that, in Berkeley's time, while slavery was legal both the legalityh and the morality of slavery were extremely controversial — there were mamy voices raised against it, and many who denounced it. IN Berkeley;s lifetime Montesquieu and Diderot, to name but two, were both writing against slavery and pointing to the fundamental evil of the system Berkeley as a philosopher and a churchman absolutely would have been aware of this debate.

Berkeley wasn't trapped by the dominant moral opinion of his day. We know this because other people — lots of other people — weren't trapped by it; they saw, and called out, the fundamental evi of slavery. And Berkeley hardly merits our esteem as a philosopher if we assume him to be incapable of independent thought and judgment. So, yeah, we can make judgments about Berkeley's complicity in slavery and what that says about his. It is not unfair to Berkeley to do so.

He was a philosopher. Maybe that means he should be held to a higher standard, I don't know. Philosophers live ordinary lives as well though (whatever the definition of ordinary is at the time).

Sure, there were voices calling it out at the time, but abolitionism in the UK (and by extension Ireland) did not take off until the end of the 18th century, but Berkeley left the Americas in the early 18th century (1732). So, I don't think he can be accused of going against prevailing opinion, or even a significant emerging opinion of the time.