According to a late August article in Irish news website Extra.ie, “The students’ union at Trinity College want the Berkeley Library on campus renamed due to the slavery links to alumnus George Berkeley. […] Until [Sept. 30], the 55-year-old building will be referred to as ‘the X Library’ in a ‘de-naming’ by the students’ union that will come into immediate effect in all of its communications.”

The Berkeley Library is a somewhat awful brutalist structure, all concrete, opened in 1967. It was in this library that, during my four years studying philosophy at Trinity College, I first read Berkeley’s challenging and radical arguments. He is the founder of philosophical idealism: the doctrine that all that actually exists is perceptions or ideas, no actual physical matter, which he regarded as illusory, much as you regard the matter you think you encounter in a dream as illusory after you wake up. I will not bore you with his reasons for this — I will only say that it was a dramatic and important moment in the history of human thought, one which I think led to many negative developments, particularly in the way it spawned all kinds of later German idealists to come to regard truth as something unknowable and all reality as subjective. (Berkeley himself did not think there was no objective truth, for what it’s worth.)