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Alfred Edward Taylor

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British philosopher (1869–1945) "A. E. Taylor" redirects here. For the American food researcher and educator, see Alonzo E. Taylor.

Alfred Edward Taylor
Born(1869-12-22)22 December 1869
Oundle, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Died31 October 1945(1945-10-31) (aged 75)
Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolBritish idealism
Neo-Hegelianism
InstitutionsNew College, Oxford
Merton College
McGill University, Montreal
University of St. Andrews
University of Edinburgh
Main interestsMetaphysics
Philosophy of religion
Moral philosophy
Scholarship of Plato
Notable ideasThe Taylor thesis

Alfred Edward Taylor (22 December 1869 – 31 October 1945), usually cited as A. E. Taylor, was a British idealist philosopher most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of idealism in his writings on metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and the scholarship of Plato. He was a fellow of the British Academy (1911) and president of the Aristotelian Society from 1928 to 1929. At Oxford he was made an honorary fellow of New College in 1931. In an age of universal upheaval and strife, he was a notable defender of Idealism in the Anglophone world.

Career

Taylor was both a philosopher in his own right, addressing all the central problems of philosophy, and a philosophical scholar.

Educated at Oxford in the closing days of the great European idealist movement, Taylor was early influenced by the school of British idealism, especially neo-Hegelianism. At New College, he obtained a First in Literae Humaniores or 'Greats' in 1891 and held a prize fellowship at Merton College (1891–96); he was re-elected as a Fellow in 1902.

He served as a lecturer at Owens College, Manchester (1898–1903) and then as professor of logic and metaphysics at McGill University, Montreal (1903–1908).

His first major book, Elements of Metaphysics (1903), dedicated (in heartfelt acknowledgment) to F. H. Bradley, is a systematic treatise of metaphysics covering such topics as ontology, cosmology, and rational psychology, and influenced by scholars including Josiah Royce, James Ward, George Frederick Stout, Richard Avenarius, and Hugo Munsterberg, as well as Robert Adamson, Wilhelm Ostwald, Bertrand Russell, and even Louis Couturat.

In later years, most notably in The Faith of a Moralist, Taylor began to move away from certain doctrines of his early idealistic youth, towards a more mature and comprehensive idealist philosophy. While students at Oxford and Cambridge were in thrall of anti-idealism, Taylor for many years influenced generations of young people at the University of St. Andrews (1908–1924) and the University of Edinburgh (1924–1941), two of the most ancient and prestigious universities of the United Kingdom, where he was Professor of Moral Philosophy. (Although he retired from his position at Edinburgh in 1941, he continued to teach and fulfil the other duties of the chair during the war until a successor was appointed in 1944.)

As a philosophical scholar he is considered, alongside Francis Macdonald Cornford, one of the greatest English Platonists of his time. In the first half of the 20th century, Taylor remained, in a reactionary age of anti-metaphysics and growing political irrationalism, a lonely but stalwart defender of 19th century European philosophical idealism in the English-speaking world.

But his scholarship was not confined to Greek philosophy. In 1938 Taylor published a landmark article "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes." This paper, as Stuart Brown notes, "advanced the bold thesis that Hobbes’s ethical theory is logically independent of the egoistic psychology and is a strict deontology." Both Taylor (1938) and Brown (1959) were reprinted in Hobbes Studies (1965). The deontological angle was developed, though with divergencies from Taylor's argument, by Howard Warrender in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1957).

Major contributions

As a scholar of Plato, he is perhaps most famous for, from his Varia Socratica (1911) onwards, presenting evidence in support of the position that the vast majority of the statements of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues accurately depict ideas of the historical man himself. His magnum opus, Plato: The Man and His Work (1926) and his Commentary on Plato's Timaeus (1927) are particularly important contributions to the higher learning of his time. In the latter work, according to W. D. Ross, Taylor held that "Plato puts into Timaeus’ mouth only views which Timaeus held or at least could have held."

In moral philosophy he explored such issues as free will and the relationship between rightness and goodness. Taylor was greatly influenced by the thought of classical antiquity, by such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, as well as medieval scholasticism.

His contribution to the philosophy of religion is mainly his 1926–28 Gifford Lectures, printed as The Faith of a Moralist (1930). Taylor made many contributions to the philosophical journal, Mind. He wrote some of the major articles in James Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.

Selected works

References

  1. "Obituary. Professor A.E. Taylor. Eminent Platonist". The Glasgow Herald. 2 November 1945. p. 6. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
  2. ^ Andel, Kelly Van. "Biography – Alfred Taylor". Gifford Lecture Series. Archived from the original on 20 April 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2008.
  3. Taylor was of the generation which followed after such influential idealists as Balfour, Bradley, and Bosanquet. (The first generations which succeeded that of Taylor, those born in the 1870s and 1880s, are notable for strong, reactionary anti-metaphysical tendencies, especially Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Charles Dunbar Broad, and, although not an Englishman, Ludwig Wittgenstein.) See: A Hundred Years of Philosophy, by John Passmore, London, 1957, Gerald Duckworth & Company, 59, 60, 61, 64, 82, 113, 318.
  4. ^ "Taylor, Alfred Edward," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 7–8, New York, 1967, Macmillan, 82–83.
  5. Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 27.
  6. Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. 1950. p. 427. ISBN 978-0-19-865303-5 – via Internet Archive.
  7. "Preface," Elements of Metaphysics, London, 1961, Methuen, ix–x.
  8. Taylor made notable use of the following argument: "Change by itself, apart from a background of identity, is impossible for the reason that where there is no underlying identity there is nothing to change. All change must be change of and in some thing. A mere succession of entirely disconnected contents held together by no common permanent nature persisting in spite of the transition, would not be change at all. If I simply have before me first A and then B, A and B being absolutely devoid of any point of community, there is no sense in saying that I have apprehended a process of change." Elements of Metaphysics, London, 1961, Methuen, 161.
  9. ^ Mander, W. J. (2005). "TAYLOR, Alfred Edward (1869-1945)". In Brown, Stuart (ed.). The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers. THOEMMES. pp. 1024, 1026. ISBN 1-84371-096-X.
  10. "Chairs of Moral Philosophy and Logic & Metaphysics". The University of Edinburgh. 15 January 2019. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
  11. According to John Macquarrie, Taylor "remained firmly attached to a theistic and spiritualist interpretation of reality." "Taylor, Alfred Edward (1869–1945)",The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 7–8, New York, 1967, Macmillan, 82–83.
  12. Taylor, A. E. (1938). "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes". Philosophy. 13 (52): 406–424. doi:10.1017/S0031819100014194. ISSN 0031-8191. JSTOR 3746387. S2CID 154655303 – via JSTOR.
  13. Brown, Stuart M. (1959). "Hobbes: The Taylor Thesis". The Philosophical Review. 68 (3): 303–323. doi:10.2307/2182565. ISSN 0031-8108. JSTOR 2182565.
  14. Brown, K. C., ed. (1965). Hobbes Studies. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press – via Internet Archive.
  15. Warrender, Howard (1957). The political philosophy of Hobbes, his theory of obligation. Oxford, Clarendon Press – via Internet Archive.
  16. cf."'Socrates' in Plato is neither, as some of the older and more uncritical expositors used to assume, the historical Socrates, nor, as is too often taken for granted to-day, the historical Plato, but the hero of the Platonic drama. The hero's character is largely modelled on that of the actual Socrates, his opinions are often those of the historical Plato, but he is still distinct from them both." Taylor, A. E. Plato, London, 1908, Archibald Constable & Co, p.32.
  17. Taylor, A. E. (1955). Plato The Man And His Work. Methuen And Company Limited.
  18. W. D. Ross, "Alfred Edward Taylor, 1869–1945," in Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 415
  19. "Taylor, Alfred Edward," Dictionary of Philosophy, revised and enlarged, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, New York, 1983, The Philosophical Library Inc., 330.
  20. Porteous, A. J. D. (1946). "A. E. Taylor (1869-1945)". Mind. 55 (218): 187–191. doi:10.1093/mind/LV.219.187. ISSN 0026-4423. JSTOR 2250551 – via JSTOR. for almost half a century he contributed articles and reviews to this journal . . . This notice would be incomplete without mention of his reviews which were at one time so constant a feature of MIND and, for some readers, were among its most interesting items
  21. MacKinnon, Donald M. (23 September 2004). "Taylor, Alfred Edward (1869–1945), philosopher". In Schofield, Mark J. (ed.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36426. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 7 February 2024. Theism, contributed to Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics . . . is one of the most valuable introductions to theistic metaphysics in the English language, and is a noteworthy combination of scholarly and analytical acumen. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

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