Alfred Edward TAYLOR

Background

Taylor, Alfred Edward was born on December 22, 1869 in Oundle, Northamptonshire.

Education

Studied at Kingswood School, Bath. New College, Oxford (Scholar). Master of Arts (Oxfordshire).

Career

Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1891-1896, re-elected 1902. Green Moral Philosophy Prizeman, Uni- 1975 versity of Oxford, 1899. Assistant Lecturer, Greek and Philosophy, Owens College, Manchester, 1890-1903.

Frothingham Professor of Philosophy in McGill University, Montreal, 1903-1908. Professor of Moral Philosophy in St. Andrews University, Scotland, since 1908.

Works

More photos

• Other Work

  • Elements Of Metaphysics - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Views

Taylor had the unique, but perhaps rather overwhelming. privilege of close personal contact with the generally reclusive F. H. Bradley during his twenties, when he was at Bradley’s college in Oxford. His first two books revealed that influence in apparently opposed ways. The Problem of Conduct (1901) is Bradleyan only in its scepticism.

It maintains that ethics is independent of metaphysics and can be carried on only in an empirical, descriptive way. In opposition to Hegelianism he gives an account of the psychology of moral feeling that is continuous with eighteenth-century British doctrines of the moral sense. He holds that there is an irresoluble conflict between the self and society as moral ends, described in rather exalted terms as a conflict between personal culture and social service.

The most that can be achieved is a compromise. There is no evident moral progress. His Elements of Metaphysics, two years later, is a presentation of Bradleyan idealism in the orderly style of a textbook or manual.

After a long period of work on the history of philosophy—most notably on Plato, who turned out to be closer to Christianity than might have been supposed—he returned to ethics in a very different spirit from that to be found in his first book. In The Faith of a Moralist (1930) and some lesser subsequent books he argued that morality presupposes religion. The true good we cannot but conceive as eternal and infinite.

We cannot achieve the moral end of selfperfection without grace, which Taylor calls the ‘initiative’ of God. Nothing finite can be truly satisfying. Immortality is required as a condition of the self-perfection we are called on to aim at.

In heaven, where there is no sin or inclination to it, we can still be actively good. The God presupposed by morality as the guarantor of freedom, effective agency and immortality is an incomplete, formal conception. It calls out for, but does not prescribe a particular form of, revelation of divine personality.

Taylor’s commitment to literal Christianity ruled out any such ideas as that time is unreal or that the finite individual personality is an insubstantial entity, a mere modification, or appearance, of the absolute as it was for Bradley. Taylor’s influence was exercised almost wholly through his historical works which were much discussed and respected.

Interests

• Metaphysics: ethics: religion. History of philosophy.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Bradley.

Connections

Spouse 1900, Lydia Jutsum, 2nd daughter of Edmund Passmore, Ruggs, Somerset.

Father:

A. Taylor

Spouse:

Lydia Jutsum