Background
Hamelin, Octave was born on July 22, 1856 in Lion d’Angers, Maine et Loire, France.
Hamelin, Octave was born on July 22, 1856 in Lion d’Angers, Maine et Loire, France.
Lycée Henri-IV and l'École Normale Supérieure.
Taught Philosophy at the Lycée de Pau ( 1883), l’Université de Bordeaux (1884-1905). the Sorbonne, where he was Professor of Ancient Philosophy, as well as at l’École Normale Supérieure, Paris (1905-1907).
Hamelin's principal ideas centre around the development of a system of categories. There are eleven: relation; number; time; space; movement; quality; alteration: specification; causality; finality; personality. He begins with the simples! notion—relation—which characterizes all that can be or that can be said. Then each successive category is shown by Hamelin’s ‘synthetic method’ to demand the next for its functioning. The system is completed with the category of personality which is found by Hamelin to be logically self-sufficient and adequate to experience. Peu sonality is essentially consciousness, and 'consciousness.. is the highest moment of reality and through knowledge is the heart of being’. Reality is thus seen as a set of representations produced for some knowing being. It is finally rational and intelligible. The concepts of intelligibility and personality are always Hamelin's main interests. Although his idea of reality has much to do with modern ideas of knowledge. Hamelin was always deeply interested in Aristotle and his categories are really a revision of the Aristotelian ones and are only Hegelian in the sense that a notion of'personality’ which involves the union of knower and known is the highest category. He had his own dialectic based on the notion that concepts always come in systems and that each gains its meaning only from *ts relations to the others. The exploration of these connections constitutes Hamelin’s ‘synthetic method’. The connection between Aristotle and Hamelin’s idealism lies in his interest in the Aristotelian notion of the active intellect and in bis interest in the Aristotelian account of the relation of thought to being. By understanding thought as permeating being, he hoped to be able to accept the Kantian critique of seventeenthand eighteenth-century metaphysics while still being able to give an account of the way in which objective knowledge of the real is possible, and this constituted his major interest. The philosophy of Renouvier provided the most direct •nfluence on him, although there are marked differences between their philosophies. L. J. Beck (1935) has explored the connections between his system of categories and that of Renouvier. Hamelin rivals Léon Brunschvicg in scholarly attention and he may well prove to be the most durable of the French idealists. Apart from the books listed here there have been some 50 short studies and, while 25 of them date from the 1920s and 1930s, there has been a steady trickle of them m the scholarly journals up to the present. There have been commentaries in German and Italian as wcll as in French. The studies have focused on his critiques of Kant and Hegel and his ‘synthetic method’ rather than on his work on Aristotle. Beck argued that the most important element in his work was his decision to make the category of relation fundamental and nearly all the studies emphasize this theme.