Background
HALDANE, Richard Burdon was born in 1856. Son of late Robert Haldane, Cloanden, W.8., and Mary Elizabeth Burdon Sanderson.
lawyer statesman Hegelian idealist
HALDANE, Richard Burdon was born in 1856. Son of late Robert Haldane, Cloanden, W.8., and Mary Elizabeth Burdon Sanderson.
Edinburgh Academy; Edinburgh and Gottingen Universities. Master of Arts 1st Class Honours in Philosophy, Edinburgh University. Gray Scholar and Ferguson Scholar in Philosophy of four Scottish Universities, 1870.
Doctor of Laws.
Gilford Lecturer in St. Andrews University, 1902-1904. Barrister 1879; Queen’s Counsel 1890. Honourable Doctor of Civil Law (Oxfordshire). F. R.S.; Secretary of State for War since 1905; Member of Parliament (Liberal) Haddingtonshire since 1885; P.C., Rector of Edinburgh University.
Main publications:(1903-1904) The Pathway to Reality, 2 vols, London: John Murray.(1921) The Reign of Relativity, London: John Murray.(1922) The Philosophy of Humanism and Other Subjects, London: John Murray.(1926) Human Experience: A Study of its Structure, London: John Murray.Secondary literature:Creighton, J. E. (1922) Review of The Reign of Relativity, in Philosophical Review 31: 288 93.Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth (1928) ‘Richard Burdon Haldane (Viscount Haldane of Cloan) 1856-1928', Proceedings of the British Academy 14: 405-41.
Liberal.
R. B. Haldane was brought up in a strongly evangelical household and was drawn to philosophy as a refuge from theology. His stay in Germany confirmed his interest in German philosophy and he colloborated in a translation of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. But he soon turned to the rational and objective idealism that he and others extracted from Kant as developed by Hegel.Asa young man he had coedited and contributed twice to the volume of Essays in Philosophical Criticism of 1883 which was a kind of manifesto of the younger idealists.
One of his papers, co-authored with his brother J.
S. Haldane, showed his keen interest in contemporary science. In these early essays he outlined his idea that there was a scale of modes of existence from those of mathematics and mechanism to those of organic life and finally conscious personality. This thought was developed in his Gifford Lectures, published in 1903.
His Reign of Relativity (1921) sought to incorporate Einstein's theory within a Hegelian framework. Although he himself insisted that he carried his idealism into every activity, a busy career in public life limited Haldane’s output in philosophy and most of his substantial works were published late in life. None the less he influenced Whitehead's conception of philosophy and Bridgman acknowledged Haldane’s thought that all human knowledge is relative.
Sources: R. B. Haldane (1929) Autobiography, London: Hodder & Stoughton. CBP II, pp. 127-48; Dictionary of National Biography 1922-1930. Metz. pp. 313-17; Passmore 1957.
Clubs: Brooks’s, Athenaeum, National Liberal; New, Scottish Liberal, Edinburgh.
Science; religion; metaphysics.