Background
George Holmes Howison was born on November 29, 1834, in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was the son of Robert and Eliza (Holmes) Howison.
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George Holmes Howison was born on November 29, 1834, in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was the son of Robert and Eliza (Holmes) Howison.
He obtained his undergraduate education at Marietta College, Ohio, where he received the degree of B. A. in 1852. He then spent three years in Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, graduating in 1855.
He did not enter the ministry, but instead spent the next nine years in rather desultory secondary school teaching at various places in Ohio and Massachusetts. From 1864 to 1866 he was assistant professor of mathematics in Washington University, St. Louis. But mathematics no more than the ministry was able to satisfy him (although he brought out a Treatise on Analytic Geometry in 1869) and he threw himself temporarily into political economy, acting as Tileston Professor in Washington University, 1866-69. During these years in St. Louis he was a member of the remarkable group headed by Henry C. Brokmeyer, William Torrey Harris, and Denton J. Snider, and under their inspiring influence he plunged into philosophy.
Somewhat late in discovering his central interest, Howison brought to his new study a maturity of thought and experience which carried him rapidly forward. He became professor of logic and philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1871-79, and was lecturer on ethics at Harvard, 1879-80. From 1880 to 1882 he studied in Europe, chiefly at the University of Berlin. On his return he was lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan, 1883-84, and in the latter year became head of the newly established department of philosophy in the University of California, where he was to remain for twenty-five years, retiring as professor emeritus in 1909.
Absent-minded as philosophers are proverbially supposed to be, but ardent and warm-hearted, Howison taught philosophy with a religious zeal. He built up a strong department at California; among his students were Mezes, Rieber, McGilvary, Bakewell, and Lovejoy, through whom he exercised a wide influence on American philosophy. His pet creation was the Philosophical Union in Berkeley, devoted to public discussion, and drawing almost annually noted philosophers from the Eastern states; its most important meeting was that at which occurred the debate of Royce, Howison, Mezes, and Le Conte.
Howison's chief published work was The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Ilustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901; 2nd ed. , 1904). He upheld a form of personal idealism similar to that of Borden P. Bowne but reached quite independently. A warm opponent of absolutism, which he deemed a denial of the moral will, he was in many ways a forerunner of William James but was both less original and less daring.
He is remembered as an American philosopher who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States.
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Quotations:
“Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission. ”
“No mind can have an efficient relation to another mind; efficiency is the attribute of every mind toward its own acts and life, or toward the world of mere "things " which forms the theatre of its action; and the causal relation between minds must be that of ideality, simply and purely. ”
“That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory abstraction after all; it is the transfiguring of the actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is the function of art to reveal. ”
On November 25, 1863, he married Lois Thompson Caswell of Norton, Massachussets.
