Herbert Wildon Carr

Background

Carr was born on January 16, 1857 in London, England, the eldest son of Benjamin William Carr.

Education

Carr was educated privately and at King’s College, University of London.

Career

Carr became a successful and wealthy businessman and belonged to the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, founded in London in 1880. As secretary, he knew scientists such as George John Romanes and philosophers such as Alexander Bain, Bernard Bosanquet, and Bertrand Russell. He was president of the society from 1916 to 1918, professor of philosophy at King’s College, London, from 1918, and visiting professor at the University of Southern California in 1925, where he lived during his last years.

Wildon Carr, as he was invariably called, developed his philosophical views in discussions at the then rather unacademic but scientifically oriented Aristotelian Society. He accepted the philosophical idealism that was influential during the 1890’s and early twentieth century; but whereas such leading idealists as Bosanquet and Francis Herbert Bradley argued for a suprapersonal Absolute in which persons were absorbed, Carr held that the ultimate realities are active persons. His inspiration here was Leibniz.

Carr believed that Leibniz, in his correspondence with Clarke on Newton’s Principia and in other writings, had given conclusive philosophical reasons for a relative theory of space and time and for the metaphysical primacy of active perceiving monads. He welcomed the general theory of relativity for providing, as he thought, scientific reasons for the monadism that he had inherited from Leibniz, whom he regarded as the founder of idealism. He stated this thesis in “The Principle of Relativity and its Importance for Philosophy” and expanded it in The General Principle of Relativity (1920).

Carr died on July 8, 1931, in Los Angeles, California.

Achievements

• Carr is best known for his contributions to philosophy, published in his many books.

Works

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  • Changing backgrounds in religion and ethics: a metaphysical meditation

    (The history of religion refers to the written record of h...)

    1927
  • Henri Bergson: the philosophy of change 1911
  • Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays
  • The Problem of Truth 1913
  • The philosophy of Benedetto Croce 1917
  • The General Principle of Relativity in Its Philosophical and Historical Aspect 1922
  • A Theory of Monads: Outlines of the Philosophy of the Principle of Relativity 1922
  • The Scientific Approach to Philosophy: Selected Essays and Reviews 1924
  • The Unique Status of Man 1928
  • The Freewill Problem 1928
  • Leibniz 1929

Views

Carr believed that the history of philosophy is inseparable from the history of science, and his teaching and writing emphasized this. Belief in absolute space and time, he held, provided a foundation for the materialist view that mind is a determined and evanescent feature of an objective world of atoms in space. Carr did not say that the principle of relativity in itself proved idealism but rather that it gave support to it in showing that there is no conception of an objective physical world apart from a point of reference and system of measurement. The idea of matter as a space occupancy, he wrote in Cogitaos Cogitata (1930), has been replaced by “the idea of fields of force arising from the deformable nature of a space-time continuum.” Carr also criticized mechanistic theories in biology, arguing that both memory and foresight imply a spontaneity that material particles could not have.

Membership

• President

  Aristotelian Society , United Kingdom

  1916 - 1918

Connections

Carr married Margaret Geraldine Spooner and had three daughters.

Father:

Benjamin William Carr

Spouse:

Margaret Geraldine Spooner

References

• Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought
  2008
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 3
  1971