Background
Strong, Charles Augustus was born on November 28, 1862 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Augustus Hopkins and Harriet Louise (Savage) Strong.
Strong, Charles Augustus was born on November 28, 1862 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Augustus Hopkins and Harriet Louise (Savage) Strong.
Educated Gütersloh Gymnasium, 1881-1883. Bachelor of Arts, University of Rochester, 1884, Doctor of Laws, 1919. Bachelor of Arts, Harvard, 1885.
Rochester Theological Seminary, 1885-1886. Berlin, 1886-1887, Paris, Berlin and Freiburg, 1889-1890.
John D. Rockefeller, March 22, 1889 (died 1906). Instructor philosophy, Cornell, 1887-1889. Docent Clark University, 1890.
Associate professor psychology, University of Chicago, 1892-1895. Lecturer psychology, 1895-1903, professor psychology, 1903-1910, Columbia. Author: Why the Mind Has a Body, 1903.
The Origin of Consciousness, 1918. The Wisdom of the Beasts, 1921. A Theory of Knowledge, 1923.
Home: Fiesole, Italy.
Strong was a member of a group known as the critical realists. According to critical realism, items of information about the external objects we perceive are not part of the objects. Instead they are ‘character complexes’ which are taken to be characters of the external objects at the moment of perception.
Where the perception is erroneous these characters are not part of the external object and in non-erroneous perception they are. But what are these ‘character complexes’? Are they contents of sensory experience? According to Strong the ‘character complex’ is not a content of sensory experience but a logical entity or essence.
Although critical realism resolves to some extent the problems relating to erroneous perception by suggesting that the data in perception are generated by and are not part of the external object, the nature of the ‘character complex’ as explained by Strong is less than clear.
Married Bessie, d.