John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought

Richard Gibbins John

Description

John Grote struggled to construct an intelligible account of philosophy at a time when radical change and sectarian conflict made understanding and clarity a rarity. This book answers three questions:* How did John Grote develop and contribute to modern Cambridge and British philosophy?* What is the significance of these contributions to modern philosophy in general and British Idealism and language philosophy in particular?* How were his ideas and his idealism incorporated into the modern philosophical tradition?Grote influenced his contemporaries, such as his students Henry Sidgwick and John Venn, in both style and content; he forged a brilliantly original philosophy of knowledge, ethics, politics and language, from a synthesis of the major British and European philosophies of his day; his social and political theory provide the origins of the 'new liberal' ideas later to reach their zenith in the writings of Green, Sidgwick, and Collingwood; he founded the 'Cambridge style' associated with Moore, Russell, Broad, McTaggart and Wittgenstein; and he was also a major influence on Oakeshott.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 07 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845407346
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Title page
John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought
John Richard Gibbins
imprint-academic.com



Copyright page
Copyright © John Richard Gibbins, 2007
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5HY, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
imprint-academic.com/idealists



Frontispiece


John Grote (1864)



Acknowledgements
There are many individuals and institutions to whom acknowledgement and thanks must be given and these are presented in historical order of procedure. Thanks must be given to the British Academy for the Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship in 1989-1990 which allowed me to study as Fellow of the British Academy in Cambridge. Also gratitude is due to Professor Sir David Williams, the President, and the Fellows of Wolfson College Cambridge for the generosity, friendship and company they showed to a Visiting Scholar in their college. Another intellectual debt is to a series of scholars under whose guidance I have been fortunate to come over the last twenty-two years, including Professor Tim Gray, Professor Noel O’Sullivan, Professor Michael Oakeshott, Professor Raymond Plant, Professor William Lubenow, Mark Garnett, Professor Bernard Crick and Peter Nicholson who have given advice and encouragement.
Special thanks are due to Trinity College Cambridge, to Jon Smith the Senior Archivist, the Librarian David McKitterick and the late Dr. Robert Robson for access to the Wren Library, and for permission to publish manuscripts and a fund of scholarly advice. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College were generous in the provision of dining rights and in granting the title of Visiting Archivist. Thanks are also due for permission to publish manuscripts held by St John’s College; Gonville and Caius College; King’s College and the University Library of Cambridge; Balliol and Bodleian libraries at Oxford; the Senate House library of the University of London and the British Library; Nottingham University for the Marley Papers; the Cambridge Records Office; the Cambridge Collection; and the Mayor and Rothschild families.
Above all others I must thank the late Teresa, Lady Rothschild (née Mayor) and her family and staff, especially Anne Thompson, for providing access to the Grote/Mayor Papers, and for accommodation, encouragement and friendship. Also the Jeans family who provided me with accommodation in Adams Road, Cambridge and whose garden abutted conveniently that of the Rothschilds in Herschel Road.
A few words of thanks must go to my family and friends who have tolerated, supported and encouraged me through the thirty-nine years it has taken to research and write this book, especially my wife Sheila and children Kate and Ben and my parents Ray and Jean. My wife has provided unswerving support and shown selfless tolerance as well as invaluable help with proof corrections. I wish to apologize to her for my selfishness. I wished that I had followed both her and John Grote’s advice more closely.
To all these people I would like to apologize for the decades it has taken to complete this work. I must excuse them from any responsibility for its defects and express my hope that its contents and reception will express my thanks to them. What follows only is an incomplete account of both the context of and contents of Grote’s philosophy. I will be content if a new generation of scholars uses this book as an embarkation point for, rather than a definitive account of, John Grote’s thoughts and writings. Grote’s corpus is a treasure house awaiting exploration.
Dr. John R. Gibbins
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
April 2007



Preface
The original idea for research into the writings of John Grote arose while I was studying for a Master of Arts degree in the Politics Department at Durham University between 1968 and 1969. I was then already acquainted with and interested in the Oxford Idealist movement and the work of those associated more recently with Michael Oakeshott. While browsing in the basement collection of books rarely read in the University Library, I lighted upon John Grote’s Exploratio Philosophica , Part One. A passage in a page opened at random provoked a major puzzle. How could a Cambridge scholar in 1865 have produced what read to be a clear statement of epistemological idealism when such arguments were conventionally held to have been produced in Britain only after 1870, and then in Oxford University? Further reading of Grote’s Exploratio , The Examination , and the Treatise on the Moral Ideals confirmed my conviction that Grote was an idealist and a critic of positivism, empiricism and utilitarianism, and this deepened my sense of puzzlement.
Original relief came with the writing of a short M.A. dissertation under the guidance of Dr. David Manning with Michael Oakeshott as the external examiner. Under their guidance I gained confidence in my original hypothesis and began both a historical and a philosophical rebuilding exercise (Gibbins 1969). In addition I came to the conclusion that Grote was an early example of that tradition of philosophy and political theory made popular later by Michael Oakeshott, a philosophy of anti-rationalism, anti-positivism, of respect for tradition, for practices and their intimations. I concluded that ‘Grote’s work bears testimony to an original and penetrating mind, the study of which has been too long neglected’, but then worried about the apparent lack of accredited admissions of influence and debt.
Under the influence of both Skinnerian and Oakeshottian approaches to research I examined both earlier accounts of Grote’s work and the study of philosophy in Victorian Cambridge with the intention of giving prominence to the context within which the author wrote and the evidence of his work’s reception. But if the conventional received accounts of Cambridge philosophy were trusted then there was no place for either idealism or a leading idealist philosopher in the university.
Hence this book gives prominence to reconstructing the intellectual context needed to correctly interpret and understand Grote’s philosophical enterprise, to revising the history of Cambridge philosophy in the period, and then to reconstructing and interpreting Grote’s writings. While some effort is made to critically appraise Grote’s philosophy and to map out his influence, these two matters are of secondary concern. Publication of this book - planned for 1990 - was delayed due to the re-discovery in 1989 of the surviving manuscripts of John Grote in the possession of Teresa, Lady Rothschild (née Mayor). This text reflects the first contemporary reading of this valuable new manuscript source, which I helped archive, and which is now deposited as the Mayor Papers in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.
In what follows I have tried to resist the dual temptations of retrospective reading and of analytic assessment against the central problems of philosophy. What I intend is a reconstruction of Grote’s philosophical work via his milieu and historical context, followed by the exploration of some interesting lines of tradition he effected; focusing especially on idealism and later Cambridge philosophy. Despite all my efforts and discoveries, the manuscript base does not allow me to provide full biographical insight into the man and his mind, nor does it allow me to trace the evolution of his thought, nor to grasp the fabric of his personal and existential life. Nor can I provide a full analysis of the significance of his work for contemporary philosophy. What I hope above all is that this book is more limited: that it will open up a new chapter in, and period of, Grotian scholarship, and so will unpack and elaborate the discoveries and clues provided below.



Introduction
If we were to judge from the rarity with which the name of John Grote (1813-1866) is mentioned in historical and philosophical writings, and the scantiness of such references as do occur, it would seem reasonable to conclude that his ideas were uninteresting and unimportant. It is the main aim of this book to controvert such a conclusion and to establish by an exercise in historical and philosophical analysis the significance of John Grote - and of Cambridge University itself - to the development of Victorian thought in the mid-nineteenth century.
The interest of John Grote to modern readers can be indicated under two headings. First, he was an original thinker who tackled and suggested solutions to the major philosophical problems of his day. Second, he filled a historical position which, when understood, makes more coherent the picture we have of Victorian intellectual development. The significance of his ideas lies in his contributions to three traditions: British idealism, Cambridge philosophy and the philosophy of language.
In the chapters on the Exploratio Philosophica , I argue that John Grote provided the most perceptive and thorough critiques of positivism and empiricism written in the nineteenth century, and that in a similar vein, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy provides the most carefully argued and effective critiques of that equally dominant school of thought. The chapters on the epistemological and metaphysical prolegomena to ethics will show that John Grote carefully edges towards the creation of one of the earliest examples