Education
Edinburgh University.
Berkeleyan ‘spiritual realist’
Edinburgh University.
1846 56, Professor of Logic at New College, Edinburgh: 1856-1891, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh.
Main publications:
(1881) Berkeley, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons.
(1890) Locke, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons.
(1894-1896) The Philosophy of Theism, Gifford Lectures, 2 vols, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons.
(1908) Berkeley and Spiritual Realism, London: Archibald Constable.
(1910) Selections from Berkeley, sixth edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Secondary literature:
Pringle-Pattison. A. S. (1915) Memoir in Proceedings of the British Academy 6 and Mind.
Fraser was at one time a minister in the Scottish Free Church and, although glad to escape from ecclesiastical strife into academic life, he was originally barred from appointment to one of the main Scottish Chairs by the rigid enforcement until the 1860s of a test that bound these Chairs to the Church of Scotland. One of his philosophical concerns was to defend a philosophical theism as ‘the true via media between atheism and pantheism’. Middle ways seem indeed to have been a hallmark of Fraser’s style of philosophizing.
He sought, in his ‘spiritual realism’, to steer a middle course between the agnostic scientific naturalism of J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and others and the absolute idealism of Hegel and his admirers in Oxford and Glasgow. He was an inheritor of the Scottish common sense school and his own philosophy is interconnected with his interpretation of Berkeley. His 1905 account of Berkeley contains, as A. Seth PringlePattison acknowledged, ‘at least as much of his own maturer way of putting things as of his favourite philosopher’.
Fraser took Berkeley seriously as a common sense philosopher. He was a self-styled ‘realist, reluctant to call his or Berkeley’s philosophy ‘idealist’ because each seemed to him quite opposed to the Hegelian idealist view that explained ‘the concrete things of sense and their motions by abstract Reason’. He agreed with Berkeley in taking the ‘concrete things of sense’ as a starting-point and took himself to have ‘expanded Berkeleys divine language of vision into a universal sense-symbolism’ 1905, P188).
Fraser played an important role in the revival of interest in Berkeley’s philosophy in the early twentieth century. His editions became the standard ones until superseded in the 1930s by that of Luce and Jessop. His annotated Selections from Berkeley was extensively used as a textbook, achieving sales of 10,000 copies by 1908.
In his annotations Fraser presented his ‘spiritual realism’. But it was as an editor that Fraser made his most important contribution.