Background
Howison, George Holmes was born on November 29, 1834 in Montgomery bounty, Maryland, United States.
Howison, George Holmes was born on November 29, 1834 in Montgomery bounty, Maryland, United States.
Marietta College and Lane Theological Seminary.
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, 1864 6. Professor of Political Economy, 1866-1869, Washington University, St Louis. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, MIT, Boston, 1872-1878.
Lecturer on Ethics, Harvard, 1879-1880. Several courses of lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy between 1880 and 1883. Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Michigan, 1883-1884.
Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, University of California, 1884-1909.
An intellectual of extremely broad scope, intimately related to the St Louis Hegelians, the Concord School of Philosophy, and the Harvard philosophers, Howison found his most sustained connection in founding the Department of Philosophy at the University of California and its Philosophical Union. Interpreting the ubiquitous idealism of his day through clues from Aristotle. Leibniz and especially Kant, Howison worked out a position he called Personal Idealism which included the following points: since persons cannot be explained by evolution, persons are eternal; space-time and its contents owe their existence to the ‘correlation and coexistence’ of minds; evolution is the movement of these external things, empowered by the spontaneous cooperation of the individual minds, towards the goal of a common ideal; the essential ideal is the attraction of God. influencing all persons by final causation, while the causation of the external world is material, formal and final; harmony with the eternal provides the basis for morality, while the constitutive power of individual minds is the mark of their freedom.