Background
Pringle-Pattison, Andrew Seth was born on December 20, 1856 in Edinburgh.
Critical realist personal idealist
Pringle-Pattison, Andrew Seth was born on December 20, 1856 in Edinburgh.
University of Edinburgh, University of Jena and University of Gottingen.
1883-1887, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University College, Cardiff. 1887-1891, Professor of LogicRhetoric and Metaphysics, University of St Andrews. 1891 1919, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of Edinburgh.
Pringle-Pattison was attracted by Hegelianism as a young man but put off it by his own moralistic individualism, drawing more on a broadly Kanfian approach. In his Balfour Lectures he identified himself as a ‘critical realist’ about the external world. He adopted early on the view that Philosophy is the 'watchdog of knowledge’. He was sceptical about systems of philosophy and held that religion and poetry went deeper than Philosophy could. None the less he did not abandon metaphysics. In his major book of 1917, he argued that ‘God, or the Absolute’ was the source of individuation, though not Himself an individual amongst others. He described his Philosophy as ‘a larger idealism" in which the dictates of morality and religion are reconciled whh the findings of science. He was, however, cautious in his claims for immortality, which he made neither a condition of morality nor a central article of religion. Passmore writes that his Philosophy had ‘a distinct attraction for philosophers of a not too rigorous cast of mind, in search °f a philosophy which would tread a comfortable v‘a media between naturalism and absolutism, science and religion, the rights of personality and lhe demands of the community’. Pringle-Pattison’s eclectic or what he called larger’ idealism was an example of the kind of normal idealism' that flourished in Australia and a number of other Parts of the English-speaking world.