Browne, Peter

Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke's theory of ideas. His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God. He proposed that God's existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real - though inevitably partial - resemblance to human things. He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a 'real resemblance', and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one. Browne entered Trinity College Dublin in 1682 and became a fellow in 1692. He served as provost of Trinity from 1699 until 1710, when he became Bishop of Cork and Ross in the south of Ireland. George Berkeley was a student and fellow at the college during Browne's tenure as provost. Years later, in the Fourth Dialogue of Alciphron, Berkeley, without naming Browne, attacked his analogical theology (Berkeley, G. §11). He took Browne to be denying that we have any notion at all of God's attributes. Browne's angry reply occupies the long final chapter of his Things Divine and Supernatural (1733).