Background
Hoernle, Reinhold Friedrlch Alfred was born on November 27, 1880 in Bonn.
Hoernle, Reinhold Friedrlch Alfred was born on November 27, 1880 in Bonn.
Balliol College, Oxford.
1912 14, Professor of Philosophy, Armstrong College, University of Durham. 1914-1920, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Harvard. 1920 3. Professor of Philosophy, Armstrong College.
1923-1943, Professor of Philosophy, University of Witwatersrand at Johannesburg.
Hoemle was an idealist in the tradition of T. H. Green who considered and carried through the implications of his philosophy for practical life. His willingness to find room for everyone made him an outstanding leader of liberal thinking in South Africa, where he became President of the Institute of Race Relations. His wide interests and ‘open-minded responsiveness’ made what he called a ‘synoptic philosophy’ natural to him. The ideal he sought was that of ‘combining a comprehensive survey of the whole of experience with the tracing of a coherent order or pattern within it’. Hoernle set no particular store by the title ‘idealist’ and recognized the need to adapt his thought to new developments in philosophy. None the less he frequently entered the lists to defend idealist doctrines such as the coherence theory of truth from attacks by pragmatists and others. It had been his intention to publish a volume of essays on ‘the present-day issue between realism and idealism’. By the time these were published after his death, however, the problems with which they dealt were no longer topical.