British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

This book offers a general and accessible account of British philosophy during the nineteenth century. Looking at debates in ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science, it takes readers from the revolutionary feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft at the start of the century through to the dominance of British Idealism at its end. The most famous philosophical names of the age, like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, and Henry Sidgwick, as well as its best-known controversies, such as the great national debates sparked off by Thomas Malthus' predictions about population growth or by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, are all examined. However, the book is distinctive also for its exploration of many other paths less well trodden by previous scholars; be it forgotten philosophical voices like those of Dugald Stewart, William Whewell, Sir William Hamilton, Mary Shepherd, James Martineau, Francis Power Cobbe, John Grote, and Herbert Spencer, or be it topics that tend to get passed over such as the Bridgewater Treatises, the issue of life on other planets, the development of British Comtism, the influence of poetry on philosophy, or the remarkable Victorian institution that was the Metaphysical Society. All the time drawing out the living discussion that took place between the various different thinkers of the age, and filling in a gap in the historical record that has been very largely neglected up to the present time, this first ever single-author account of nineteenth century British philosophy opens a window onto this most self-consciously philosophical of ages. It will be of vital interest to contemporary philosophers interested in charting the emergence of the modern discipline, as well as to general historians of the Victorian period looking to understand the intellectual background of the times.