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The Dictionary
of Twentieth-Century
British Philosophers
THOEMMES
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THE
DICTIONARY OF
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
BRITISH
PHILOSOPHERS
Volume 1
A-L
GENERAL EDITOR
Stuart Brown
SUPERVISING EDITORS
Hugh Bredin Jon Pike
Stuart Brown Patrick Rysiew
Diane Collinson David Scott
Anthony Ellis Alan PR Sell
John M. Lynch Robert Wilkinson
WJ. Mander
thoemmes
First published in 2005 by
Thoemmes Continuum
11 Great George Street
Bristol BS1 5RR, England
http://www.thoemmes.co.m
The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers
2 Volumes : ISBN 1 84371 096 X
© Thoemmes Continuum, 2005
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record of this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Typeset in Sabon at Thoemmes Continuum.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd.
This book is printed on acid-free paper, sewn, and
cased in a durable buckram.
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
How to use the Dictionary xiii
General bibliography xv
List of contributors xvii
Biographical entries A-Z 1
Name index 1191
Supplementary list 1209
V
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INTRODUCTION
The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers is the fourth in a series of
Thoemmes dictionaries of British philosophers. Volumes have appeared already on the
British philosophers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The general
character of this dictionary, as well as its aims and style, is intended to follow those of its
predecessors so far as this is possible given the changes associated with the twentieth
century.
As with its companions, the entries in this dictionary are of varying lengths, ranging from a
few hundred words to several thousand, depending on considerations such as the importance of
the subjects in the context of philosophy, the range of their philosophical interests and the
volume of their significant publications. Each entry is divided into three parts. (1) There is some
biographical information about the subject: dates and places of birth, where known, education
and career. As many of the subjects of the entries are either still living or only recently deceased,
this information may be limited by considerations of confidentiality. (2) There is an account of
the subject's thought and contribution to philosophy, based upon his or her published work.
This is the main section of each entry. (3) There is an often highly selective bibliography,
including the subject's main philosophical works, other related writings and secondary
literature, if any.
The intention has also been to be fairly comprehensive and to include individuals who had a
substantial publication, in some cases no more than a book. This policy means that, at one
extreme, major figures on whom entire books have been written are dealt with relatively briefly
and reference given to the existing secondary literature, whilst, at the other extreme, the entries
on minor figures have mostly had to be researched almost entirely from primary sources and
may be the first pieces of secondary literature of their kind on the subjects with whom they deal.
As with the earlier dictionaries in this series the intention is that the entries should be of interest
both to the general reader who wants to find out about British philosophy of the period and
also that they should serve as starting points for those who want to make a further study of
individual philosophers.
The division of history into centuries is, of course, arbitrary. Many of the most significant
developments both in philosophy and affecting philosophy in the twentieth century go back to
the previous century. There are three external changes, for instance, that affected the
development of philosophy, and no doubt other established academic subjects, in the twentieth
century. These are (1) the growth of academic societies and journals, (2) the expansion of
universities and of student numbers and (3) professionalization. These changes all take their
beginnings in the nineteenth century.
vn
Introduction
1. The two most prestigious philosophical societies in twentieth-century Britain were the
Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. The Aristotelian Society was founded in 1880
and its first President, Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (1832-1912) was a layman. After a
few years it faltered and it was refounded in 1900, and the new series of the Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society date from that year. The Aristotelian Society was, and remains, first
and foremost a London-based organization that promotes philosophical discussion by
regular meetings. For some years it had a largely lay membership, including a significant
number of women, though this had greatly declined by the latter decades of the century. The
journal Mind was founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain and was financially supported by him
in its early days. When G.F. Stout took over the editorship in 1891, a new series was begun
which continued through the whole of the twentieth century. After Bain's death in 1903 the
Mind Association was established mainly to support the journal. Since 1918 there has been a
conference, normally each year, where these two societies have come together, and whose
proceedings have been published as a supplementary volume of the Aristotelian Society. This
conference, known as the Joint Session, has been the pre-eminent philosophical conference in
Britain for much of the twentieth century and retains its leading position as a general
philosophy conference, even though there has been a burgeoning of specialist conferences in
the last few decades of the century.
During the early twentieth century other new philosophical institutions emerged. Firstly
there were two organizations that sought to present philosophy to the general public: the
Philosophical Society of England, which was founded in 1913 and publishes The
Philosopher•; and the British (now Royal) Institute of Philosophy, which was founded in 1926
and which publishes the journal Philosophy. More for professional philosophers is Analysis,
founded as an organ of analytic philosophy in 1933 and run by a Committee whose activities
now extend beyond the publication of the journal. The Scots Philosophical Club, founded in
1900, became the sponsor for another major journal, The Philosophical Quarterly', in 1951.
Since 1960 specialist philosophical societies with their own journals have proliferated,
including the British Society of Aesthetics and the British Society for the Philosophy of
Science, both founded in 1960, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (1964),
the British Society for Phenomenology (1970), the Society for Applied Philosophy (1982), the
British Society for the History of Philosophy and the Society for Applied Philosophy, both
founded in 1984.
2. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were eight universities in the British Isles:
two in England (Oxford and Cambridge), four in Scotland (St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow
and Edinburgh) and one in Ireland (Trinity College Dublin). In the first half of the nineteenth
century three new universities were founded: University College London (1826), Durham
(1826) and Queen's University, Belfast (1845). By the end of the nineteenth century,
however, every major city had institutions of higher education and either had or aspired to
having a university, for example, the Victoria University of Manchester (1880), and there
was a spate of Royal Charters granted in the first decade of the twentieth century:
Birmingham (1900), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904), Sheffield (1905) and Bristol (1908).
This process of expansion was set back by two world wars but picked up again in the 1950s
and 60s. Originally it was a matter of course that a new university would have a chair of
philosophy round whom a teaching department would be formed. This ceased to be true
after the 1970s and there were even closures of philosophy departments in some institutions.
Even with these losses, however, there were more than fifty departments of philosophy in
viii
