New from Timo Airaksinen (The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft), a 2023 article on “The Idea of Lost Identity in Fantasy Fiction: Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft”. Released June 2024, and freely available for download.

Also, if you’re interested in delving deep into Lovecraft’s apparently more-than-passing interest in the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley, I see that Timo Airaksinen edited a book on Berkeley’s Lasting Legacy: 300 Years Later (2011).

    “Another outland pilgrimage is to the Bishop Berkeley country, some four miles beyond Newport beach on the road to Middletown.” (Lovecraft, Selected Letters II)

    “the rocks and surf on which we looked down from our exalted perch — a perch which 200 years ago [1728-32] was a favourite of Dean (later Bishop) Berkeley as he composed his famous Aleiphron or, The Minute Philosopher. (Lovecraft, Selected Letters IV)

    “discussed the cosmos with Dean Berkeley’s shade [i.e. ‘ghost’]” (Lovecraft)

Berkeley believed, among other things, that “reality isn’t separate from perception” and was a deep thinker on language who was later compared to Wittgenstein. Both of which might have interested Lovecraft, as well as his long-ago presence in nearby Newport. Apparently, according the blurb for Airaksinen’s book, by the 20th century Berkeley had been forgotten for all but his early writing on reality/perception. But one wonders what Lovecraft picked up of Berkeley in his deep reading of the 18th century texts in his grandfather’s attic library, and also by reading Berkeley direct (there was also a 1929 sampler). Note also “George Berkeley and the Alchemical Tradition” which “examines the presence of alchemical tradition in Siris, the last published book of George [Bishop] Berkeley”. This is a chapter in The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment (2007).