Background
Muirhead, John Henry was born on April 28, 1855 in Glasgow.
Muirhead, John Henry was born on April 28, 1855 in Glasgow.
Glasgow University and Balliol College.
Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy, Birmingham, 1897-1922.
Muirhcad’s services to philosophy were considerable, as historian of the tradition of resistance to empiricism in English-language philosophy and of Coleridge’s philosophical career, as the original editor of the important 'Library of Philosophy’ published by Allen & Unwin, as editor of the first two volumes of Contemporary British Philosophy, composed of essays surveying their work by leading figures and. in a modest way, by applying his genial, amorphous idealism to social problems. The form of idealism he had imbibed from Edward Caird was an accommodating affair, well suited for reconciling apparently conflicting views in some kind of eclectic harmony. This amiably undiscriminating spirit is evident in his ethical writings, which are his chief direct contribution to philosophy. Like other idealists he rejects both the greatest happiness principle and Kant’s abstract conception of duty as sufficient accounts of morality in favour of the idea of self-realization, understood as embracing both particular desires and the rational form of self-imposed law. With the passage of time, new developments were found a place, particularly the insistence of the Oxford moralists. Prichard and Ross, on the intuitive character of obligation. Muirhead’s largest contribution to philosophy, in the widest sense, is his discernment of what he called the Platonic tradition, a more or less continuous, if sometimes only just detectable, stream of thought, in opposition to the dominant native empiricism. At a time when most British philosophers were indifferent to, and so ignorant of, the history of the subject, he drew attention to Cudworth, Norris and Collier, as well as to the incorporation of German philosophy into British thought in the nineteenth-century from Coleridge and Carlyle onwards.