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Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet FRSE (8 March 1788 – 6 May 1856) was a Scottish metaphysician. He is often referred to as William Stirling Hamilton of Preston, in reference to his mother, Elizabeth Stirling.
Sir William Hamilton Bt | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 8 March 1788 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Died | 6 May 1856 (aged 68) Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Occupation | Professor The University of Edinburgh |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Common sense realism |
Main interests | Metaphysics, logic |
| Signature | |
 | |
Early life
He was born in rooms at the University of Glasgow, He was from an academic family: his father Professor William Hamilton, had in 1781, on the recommendation of William Hunter, been appointed to succeed his own father, Dr Thomas Hamilton, as Regius Professor of Anatomy, Glasgow; he died in 1790, aged 32. William Hamilton and his younger brother, Thomas Hamilton, were brought up by their mother.
Hamilton received his early education at Glasgow Grammar School, except for two years which he spent in a private school at Chiswick in Kent, and in 1807 went as a Snell Exhibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a first class in literis humanioribus and took his BA in 1811 (MA 1814). He had been intended for the medical profession, but soon after leaving Oxford he gave up this idea, and in 1813 became a member of the Scottish bar, as a qualified advocate.
Hamilton's life continued to be that of a student, while he was gradually forming his philosophic system. Investigation enabled him to make good his claim to represent the ancient family of Hamilton of Preston, and in 1816 he took up its baronetcy, which had been in abeyance since the death of Sir Robert Hamilton of Preston (1650–1701).
Early time as philosopher
Two visits to Germany in 1817 and 1820 led to William's taking up the study of German and later on that of contemporary German philosophy, which was almost entirely neglected in British universities. In 1820 he was a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, which had fallen vacant on the death of Thomas Brown, colleague of Dugald Stewart, and Stewart's consequent resignation, however he was defeated on political grounds by John Wilson (1785–1854), the "Christopher North" of Blackwood's Magazine. In 1821 he was appointed professor of civil history and delivered several courses of lectures on the history of modern Europe and the history of literature. The salary was £100 a year, derived from a local beer tax, and was discontinued after a time. No pupils were compelled to attend, the class dwindled, and Hamilton gave it up when the salary ceased. In January 1827 his mother, to whom he had been devoted, died. In March 1828 he married his cousin, Janet Marshall.
Around this time he moved to live in a recently built townhouse at 11 Manor Place, in Edinburgh's west end.
Publications
In 1829, his career of authorship began with the appearance of the well-known essay on the "Philosophy of the Unconditioned" (a critique of Victor Cousin's Cours de philosophie)–the first of a series of articles contributed by him to the Edinburgh Review. He was elected in 1836 to the University of Edinburgh chair of logic and metaphysics, and from this time dates the influence which, during the next 20 years, he exerted over the thought of the younger generation in Scotland. Much about the same time he began the preparation of an annotated edition of Thomas Reid's works, intending to annex to it a number of dissertations. However before this design had been carried out, he was struck, in 1844, with paralysis of the right side which seriously crippled his bodily powers, though left his mind unimpaired.
The edition of Reid appeared in 1846, but with only seven of the intended dissertations, one unfinished. At his death he had still not completed the work; notes on the subjects to be discussed were found among his manuscripts. Considerably earlier, he had formed his theory of logic, the leading principles of which were indicated in the prospectus of "an essay on a new analytic of logical forms" prefixed to his edition of Reid. But the elaboration of the scheme in its details and applications continued during the next few years to occupy much of his leisure. Out of this arose a sharp controversy with Augustus De Morgan. The essay did not appear, but the results of the labour gone through are contained in the appendices to his Lectures on Logic. Hamilton had also drawn from the works of Wilhelm Esser in his explanation of laws in the language of agency. For instance, he cited Esser's definition of universal law, to explain the sense or "quality" of "necessary".
Hamilton also prepared extensive materials for a publication which he designed on the personal history, influence and opinions of Martin Luther. Here he advanced so far as to have planned and partly carried out the arrangement of the work; but it did not go further, and still remains in manuscript. In 1852–1853 appeared the first and second editions of his Discussions in Philosophy, Literature and Education, a reprint, with large additions, of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Soon after, his general health began to fail. Assisted by his devoted wife, he persevered in literary labour; and during 1854–1855 he brought out nine volumes of a new edition of Stewart's works. The only remaining volume was to have contained a memoir of Stewart, but this he did not live to write. Hamilton was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855. He taught his class for the last time in the winter of 1855–1856. Shortly after the close of the session he was taken ill, and died in Edinburgh.
Death
He died on 6 May 1856 and was buried in St John's Episcopal Churchyard at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh. The stone is not in its original location and is used to edge the enclosure at the east end of the church.
He had married Janet, the daughter of Hubert Marshall, and was succeeded by his son , a general in the British Army.
Place in thought
In 1840, the University of Leyden granted him an honorary Doctor of Divinity (DD), a rarity for persons outside the clergy.
Hamilton's positive contribution to the progress of thought is comparatively slight, but he stimulated a spirit of criticism in his pupils by insisting on the great importance of psychology as opposed to the older metaphysical method, and by his recognition of the importance of German philosophy, especially that of Immanuel Kant. By far his most important work was "Philosophy of the Unconditioned," the development of the principle that for the human finite mind, there can be no knowledge of the Infinite. The basis of his argument is the thesis, "To think is to condition." Deeply impressed with Kant's antithesis between subject and object, the knowing and the known, Hamilton laid down the principle that every object is known only in virtue of its relations to other objects. From this it follows that limitless time, space, power, etc., are inconceivable. The fact, however, that all thought seems to demand the idea of the infinite or absolute provides a sphere for faith, which is thus the specific faculty of theology. It is a weakness characteristic of the human mind that it cannot conceive any phenomenon without a beginning: hence the conception of the causal relation, according to which every phenomenon has its cause in preceding phenomena, and its effect in subsequent phenomena. The causal concept is, therefore, only one of the ordinary necessary forms of the cognitive consciousness limited, as we have seen, by being confined to that which is relative.
As regards the problem of the nature of objectivity, Hamilton simply accepts the evidence of consciousness as to the separate existence of the object: "the root of our nature cannot be a lie." In virtue of this assumption, Hamilton's philosophy becomes a "natural realism." In fact, his whole position is a strange compound of Kant and Reid. Its chief practical corollary is the denial of philosophy as a method of attaining absolute knowledge and its relegation to the academic sphere of mental training. The transition from philosophy to theology, i.e. to the sphere of faith, is presented by Hamilton under the analogous relation between the mind and the body. As the mind is to the body, so is the unconditioned Absolute or God to the world of the conditioned. Consciousness, itself a conditioned phenomenon, must derive from or depend on some different thing prior to or behind material phenomena. Curiously enough, however, Hamilton does not explain how it comes about that God, who in the terms of the analogy bears to the conditioned mind the relation which the conditioned mind bears to its objects, can be unconditioned. God can be regarded only as related to consciousness, and insofar is, therefore, not absolute or unconditioned. Thus the very principles of Hamilton's philosophy are apparently violated in his theological argument.
Hamilton regarded logic as a purely formal science; it seemed to him an unscientific mixing together of heterogeneous elements to treat as parts of the same science the formal and the material conditions of knowledge. He was quite ready to allow that on this view logic cannot be used as a means of discovering or guaranteeing facts, even the most general, and expressly asserted that it has to do, not with the objective validity, but only with the mutual relations, of judgments. He further held that induction and deduction are correlative processes of formal logic, each resting on the necessities of thought and deriving thence its several laws. The only logical laws which he recognised were the three axioms of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle, which he regarded as severally phases of one general condition of the possibility of existence and, therefore, of thought. The law of reason and consequent he considered not as different, but merely as expressing metaphysically what these express logically. He added as a postulate—which in his theory was of importance--"that logic be allowed to state explicitly what is thought implicitly." in logic, Hamilton is known chiefly as the inventor of the doctrine of the "quantification of the predicate," i.e. that the judgment "All A is B " should really mean "All A is all B," whereas the ordinary universal proposition should be stated "All A is some B." This view, which was supported by Stanley Jevons, is fundamentally at fault since it implies that the predicate is thought of in its extension; in point of fact when a judgment is made, e.g. about men, that they are mortal ("All men are mortal"), the intention is to attribute a quality (i.e. the predicate is used in connotation). In other words, we are not considering the question "what kind are men among the various things which must die?" (as is implied in the form "all men are some mortals") but "what is the fact about men?" We are not stating a mere identity (see further, e.g., H. W. B. Joseph, Introduction to Logic, 1906, pp. 198 foll.).
The philosopher to whom above all others Hamilton professed allegiance was Aristotle. His works were the object of his profound and constant study, and supplied in fact the mould in which his whole philosophy was cast. With the commentators on the Aristotelian writings, ancient, medieval and modern, he was also familiar; and the scholastic philosophy he studied with care and appreciation at a time when it had hardly yet begun to attract attention in his country. His wide reading enabled him to trace many a doctrine to the writings of forgotten thinkers; and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to draw forth such from their obscurity, and to give due acknowledgment, even if it chanced to be of the prior possession of a view or argument that he had thought out for himself. Of modern German philosophy he was a diligent, if not always a sympathetic, student. How profoundly his thinking was modified by that of Kant is evident from the tenor of his speculations; nor was this less the case because, on fundamental points, he came to widely different conclusions.
Hamilton was more than a philosopher; his knowledge and interests embraced all subjects related to that of the human mind. He studied anatomy and physiology. He was also well-read in ancient and modern literature, being particularly interested in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among his literary projects were editions of the works of George Buchanan and Julius Caesar Scaliger. His general scholarship found expression in his library, which became part of the library of the University of Glasgow.
He also may have influenced subsequent philosophy as the inspiration for a critique by John Stuart Mill which resulted in perhaps the clearest statements ever of the idea of matter as the .
Education
His chief practical interest was in education, an interest which he manifested alike as a teacher and as a writer, and which had led him long before he was either to study of the subject both theoretical and historical. He thence adopted views as to the ends and methods of education that, when afterwards carried out or advocated by him, met with general recognition; but he also expressed in one of his articles an unfavourable view of the study of mathematics as a mental gymnastic, which excited much opposition, but which he never saw reason to alter. As a teacher, he was zealous and successful, and his writings on university organisation and reform had, at the time of their appearance, a decisive practical effect, and contain much that is of permanent value.
Last works
His posthumous works are his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1860), 4 vols., edited by H. L. Mansel, Oxford, and John Veitch (Metaphysics; Logic); and Additional Notes to Reid's Works, from Sir W. Hamilton's Manuscripts., under the editorship of H. L. Mansel, D.D. (1862). A Memoir of Sir W. Hamilton, by Veitch, appeared in 1869.
References
- Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X.
- "Edinburgh Post Office annual directory, 1832–1833". National Library of Scotland. p. 81. Retrieved 25 February 2018.
- Manning, Russell Re (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology. Oxford, UK: OUP Oxford. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-19-955693-9.
- Gabbay, Dov M.; Woods, John (2008). British Logic in the Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam: Elsevier. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-444-51610-7.
- "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter H" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 13 September 2016.
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Hamilton, Elizabeth; Mitchell, John Malcolm (1911). "Hamilton, Sir William (philosopher)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). pp. 888–890.
Further reading
- Hamilton by John Veitch (1882)
External links
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Quotations related to Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet at Wikiquote
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Works by or about Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet at Wikisource- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "William Stirling Hamilton", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
This article includes a list of general references but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations February 2012 Learn how and when to remove this message Sir William Hamilton 9th Baronet FRSE 8 March 1788 6 May 1856 was a Scottish metaphysician He is often referred to as William Stirling Hamilton of Preston in reference to his mother Elizabeth Stirling SirWilliam HamiltonBtBorn 1788 03 08 8 March 1788 Glasgow ScotlandDied6 May 1856 1856 05 06 aged 68 Edinburgh ScotlandOccupationProfessor The University of EdinburghEra19th century philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolCommon sense realismMain interestsMetaphysics logicSignatureBust of Sir William Hamilton by William Brodie Old College University of EdinburghEarly lifeHe was born in rooms at the University of Glasgow He was from an academic family his father Professor William Hamilton had in 1781 on the recommendation of William Hunter been appointed to succeed his own father Dr Thomas Hamilton as Regius Professor of Anatomy Glasgow he died in 1790 aged 32 William Hamilton and his younger brother Thomas Hamilton were brought up by their mother Hamilton received his early education at Glasgow Grammar School except for two years which he spent in a private school at Chiswick in Kent and in 1807 went as a Snell Exhibitioner to Balliol College Oxford He obtained a first class in literis humanioribus and took his BA in 1811 MA 1814 He had been intended for the medical profession but soon after leaving Oxford he gave up this idea and in 1813 became a member of the Scottish bar as a qualified advocate Hamilton s life continued to be that of a student while he was gradually forming his philosophic system Investigation enabled him to make good his claim to represent the ancient family of Hamilton of Preston and in 1816 he took up its baronetcy which had been in abeyance since the death of Sir Robert Hamilton of Preston 1650 1701 Early time as philosopherTwo visits to Germany in 1817 and 1820 led to William s taking up the study of German and later on that of contemporary German philosophy which was almost entirely neglected in British universities In 1820 he was a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh which had fallen vacant on the death of Thomas Brown colleague of Dugald Stewart and Stewart s consequent resignation however he was defeated on political grounds by John Wilson 1785 1854 the Christopher North of Blackwood s Magazine In 1821 he was appointed professor of civil history and delivered several courses of lectures on the history of modern Europe and the history of literature The salary was 100 a year derived from a local beer tax and was discontinued after a time No pupils were compelled to attend the class dwindled and Hamilton gave it up when the salary ceased In January 1827 his mother to whom he had been devoted died In March 1828 he married his cousin Janet Marshall Around this time he moved to live in a recently built townhouse at 11 Manor Place in Edinburgh s west end PublicationsWilliam Hamilton started his literary career in 1829 with the essay Philosophy of the Unconditioned In 1829 his career of authorship began with the appearance of the well known essay on the Philosophy of the Unconditioned a critique of Victor Cousin s Cours de philosophie the first of a series of articles contributed by him to the Edinburgh Review He was elected in 1836 to the University of Edinburgh chair of logic and metaphysics and from this time dates the influence which during the next 20 years he exerted over the thought of the younger generation in Scotland Much about the same time he began the preparation of an annotated edition of Thomas Reid s works intending to annex to it a number of dissertations However before this design had been carried out he was struck in 1844 with paralysis of the right side which seriously crippled his bodily powers though left his mind unimpaired The edition of Reid appeared in 1846 but with only seven of the intended dissertations one unfinished At his death he had still not completed the work notes on the subjects to be discussed were found among his manuscripts Considerably earlier he had formed his theory of logic the leading principles of which were indicated in the prospectus of an essay on a new analytic of logical forms prefixed to his edition of Reid But the elaboration of the scheme in its details and applications continued during the next few years to occupy much of his leisure Out of this arose a sharp controversy with Augustus De Morgan The essay did not appear but the results of the labour gone through are contained in the appendices to his Lectures on Logic Hamilton had also drawn from the works of Wilhelm Esser in his explanation of laws in the language of agency For instance he cited Esser s definition of universal law to explain the sense or quality of necessary Hamilton also prepared extensive materials for a publication which he designed on the personal history influence and opinions of Martin Luther Here he advanced so far as to have planned and partly carried out the arrangement of the work but it did not go further and still remains in manuscript In 1852 1853 appeared the first and second editions of his Discussions in Philosophy Literature and Education a reprint with large additions of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review Soon after his general health began to fail Assisted by his devoted wife he persevered in literary labour and during 1854 1855 he brought out nine volumes of a new edition of Stewart s works The only remaining volume was to have contained a memoir of Stewart but this he did not live to write Hamilton was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855 He taught his class for the last time in the winter of 1855 1856 Shortly after the close of the session he was taken ill and died in Edinburgh DeathThe grave of Sir William Hamilton St Johns Church Princes Street He died on 6 May 1856 and was buried in St John s Episcopal Churchyard at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh The stone is not in its original location and is used to edge the enclosure at the east end of the church He had married Janet the daughter of Hubert Marshall and was succeeded by his son a general in the British Army Place in thoughtIn 1840 the University of Leyden granted him an honorary Doctor of Divinity DD a rarity for persons outside the clergy Hamilton s positive contribution to the progress of thought is comparatively slight but he stimulated a spirit of criticism in his pupils by insisting on the great importance of psychology as opposed to the older metaphysical method and by his recognition of the importance of German philosophy especially that of Immanuel Kant By far his most important work was Philosophy of the Unconditioned the development of the principle that for the human finite mind there can be no knowledge of the Infinite The basis of his argument is the thesis To think is to condition Deeply impressed with Kant s antithesis between subject and object the knowing and the known Hamilton laid down the principle that every object is known only in virtue of its relations to other objects From this it follows that limitless time space power etc are inconceivable The fact however that all thought seems to demand the idea of the infinite or absolute provides a sphere for faith which is thus the specific faculty of theology It is a weakness characteristic of the human mind that it cannot conceive any phenomenon without a beginning hence the conception of the causal relation according to which every phenomenon has its cause in preceding phenomena and its effect in subsequent phenomena The causal concept is therefore only one of the ordinary necessary forms of the cognitive consciousness limited as we have seen by being confined to that which is relative As regards the problem of the nature of objectivity Hamilton simply accepts the evidence of consciousness as to the separate existence of the object the root of our nature cannot be a lie In virtue of this assumption Hamilton s philosophy becomes a natural realism In fact his whole position is a strange compound of Kant and Reid Its chief practical corollary is the denial of philosophy as a method of attaining absolute knowledge and its relegation to the academic sphere of mental training The transition from philosophy to theology i e to the sphere of faith is presented by Hamilton under the analogous relation between the mind and the body As the mind is to the body so is the unconditioned Absolute or God to the world of the conditioned Consciousness itself a conditioned phenomenon must derive from or depend on some different thing prior to or behind material phenomena Curiously enough however Hamilton does not explain how it comes about that God who in the terms of the analogy bears to the conditioned mind the relation which the conditioned mind bears to its objects can be unconditioned God can be regarded only as related to consciousness and insofar is therefore not absolute or unconditioned Thus the very principles of Hamilton s philosophy are apparently violated in his theological argument Hamilton regarded logic as a purely formal science it seemed to him an unscientific mixing together of heterogeneous elements to treat as parts of the same science the formal and the material conditions of knowledge He was quite ready to allow that on this view logic cannot be used as a means of discovering or guaranteeing facts even the most general and expressly asserted that it has to do not with the objective validity but only with the mutual relations of judgments He further held that induction and deduction are correlative processes of formal logic each resting on the necessities of thought and deriving thence its several laws The only logical laws which he recognised were the three axioms of identity noncontradiction and excluded middle which he regarded as severally phases of one general condition of the possibility of existence and therefore of thought The law of reason and consequent he considered not as different but merely as expressing metaphysically what these express logically He added as a postulate which in his theory was of importance that logic be allowed to state explicitly what is thought implicitly in logic Hamilton is known chiefly as the inventor of the doctrine of the quantification of the predicate i e that the judgment All A is B should really mean All A is all B whereas the ordinary universal proposition should be stated All A is some B This view which was supported by Stanley Jevons is fundamentally at fault since it implies that the predicate is thought of in its extension in point of fact when a judgment is made e g about men that they are mortal All men are mortal the intention is to attribute a quality i e the predicate is used in connotation In other words we are not considering the question what kind are men among the various things which must die as is implied in the form all men are some mortals but what is the fact about men We are not stating a mere identity see further e g H W B Joseph Introduction to Logic 1906 pp 198 foll The philosopher to whom above all others Hamilton professed allegiance was Aristotle His works were the object of his profound and constant study and supplied in fact the mould in which his whole philosophy was cast With the commentators on the Aristotelian writings ancient medieval and modern he was also familiar and the scholastic philosophy he studied with care and appreciation at a time when it had hardly yet begun to attract attention in his country His wide reading enabled him to trace many a doctrine to the writings of forgotten thinkers and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to draw forth such from their obscurity and to give due acknowledgment even if it chanced to be of the prior possession of a view or argument that he had thought out for himself Of modern German philosophy he was a diligent if not always a sympathetic student How profoundly his thinking was modified by that of Kant is evident from the tenor of his speculations nor was this less the case because on fundamental points he came to widely different conclusions Hamilton was more than a philosopher his knowledge and interests embraced all subjects related to that of the human mind He studied anatomy and physiology He was also well read in ancient and modern literature being particularly interested in the 16th and 17th centuries Among his literary projects were editions of the works of George Buchanan and Julius Caesar Scaliger His general scholarship found expression in his library which became part of the library of the University of Glasgow He also may have influenced subsequent philosophy as the inspiration for a critique by John Stuart Mill which resulted in perhaps the clearest statements ever of the idea of matter as the EducationHis chief practical interest was in education an interest which he manifested alike as a teacher and as a writer and which had led him long before he was either to study of the subject both theoretical and historical He thence adopted views as to the ends and methods of education that when afterwards carried out or advocated by him met with general recognition but he also expressed in one of his articles an unfavourable view of the study of mathematics as a mental gymnastic which excited much opposition but which he never saw reason to alter As a teacher he was zealous and successful and his writings on university organisation and reform had at the time of their appearance a decisive practical effect and contain much that is of permanent value Last worksHis posthumous works are his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic 1860 4 vols edited by H L Mansel Oxford and John Veitch Metaphysics Logic and Additional Notes to Reid s Works from Sir W Hamilton s Manuscripts under the editorship of H L Mansel D D 1862 A Memoir of Sir W Hamilton by Veitch appeared in 1869 ReferencesBiographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 2002 PDF The Royal Society of Edinburgh July 2006 ISBN 0 902 198 84 X Edinburgh Post Office annual directory 1832 1833 National Library of Scotland p 81 Retrieved 25 February 2018 Manning Russell Re 2013 The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology Oxford UK OUP Oxford p 101 ISBN 978 0 19 955693 9 Gabbay Dov M Woods John 2008 British Logic in the Nineteenth Century Amsterdam Elsevier p 107 ISBN 978 0 444 51610 7 Book of Members 1780 2010 Chapter H PDF American Academy of Arts and Sciences Retrieved 13 September 2016 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain Hamilton Elizabeth Mitchell John Malcolm 1911 Hamilton Sir William philosopher Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 12 11th ed pp 888 890 Further readingHamilton by John Veitch 1882 External linksQuotations related to Sir William Hamilton 9th Baronet at Wikiquote Works by or about Sir William Hamilton 9th Baronet at Wikisource O Connor John J Robertson Edmund F William Stirling Hamilton MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive University of St AndrewsBaronetage of Nova ScotiaPreceded byRobert Hamilton Baronet of Preston 1799 1856 Succeeded byWilliam Stirling Hamilton
