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WorkHenry Sidgwick

Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures and Essays

Sidgwick on Kant and Green, left as lecture notes at his death, with essays on common sense and on truth.

by Henry Sidgwick477 passages held

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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
English

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Overview

Kant had told metaphysicians to suspend their work until they had settled whether metaphysics was possible at all, and Henry Sidgwick, lecturing on metaphysics at Cambridge in the last years of his life, wanted to know why metaphysicians alone. His answer, at the start of the course, is that only one of Kant's reasons survives scrutiny: mathematics and physics command general agreement and make steady progress, and metaphysics does not. He taught Kant because the two systems most in vogue among his contemporaries, the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and the idealism of T. H. Green, both led back to him, and he meant to turn the lectures into a book on Kant and his influence in England. He gave the course for the last time in the academic year 1899–1900 and died that August with the book unwritten. James Ward, his colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge, assembled what there was and published it in 1905. Sidgwick had judged the Kant lectures close to finished and the lectures on Green not yet fit for a book; Ward printed both, with part of the last lecture Sidgwick ever gave, and chose to interfere with the text as little as possible. The essays, reprinted from Mind and the Journal of Philology, include an address in Glasgow on the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, who had taught there, and "Criteria of Truth and Error", from January 1900. That essay, left unfinished, gives up the search for an infallible test of truth for the humbler work of catching errors.

Key concepts

What is Kant's 'thing in itself'?

The thing as it is apart from our way of perceiving it, as opposed to the thing as it appears to us in space and time. Kant holds that we know only appearances, yet treats the thing in itself as real, the unknown something that affects our senses. Sidgwick returns to it again and again, because so much of Kant's system depends on how it is understood.

What are Kant's antinomies?

Pairs of opposed conclusions that reason seems able to prove with equal force when it reasons about the world as a whole: that the world had a beginning and that it had none, that there is free causation and that everything follows natural law. Kant traces them to treating appearances as things in themselves. Sidgwick examines the mathematical and the dynamical antinomies separately.

What does Sidgwick mean by 'mentalism'?

His preferred name for what is usually called idealism: the view that the things we take for material are really made up of feelings and thoughts, actual or possible, held together in some mind. He sets it against materialism, which explains mind by matter, and against the natural dualism of mind and matter that he himself provisionally holds.

What are Sidgwick's three verifications of truth?

Tests drawn from the ways minds have actually been convinced of error. A belief should hold up under careful reflection on the belief itself; it should be consistent with the believer's other beliefs; and it should meet with the agreement of other minds, the social verification on which most people in practice rely. Where all three are met, error is excluded as far as it can be.

What is Spencer's 'Unknowable'?

The ultimate reality that, on Spencer's view, lies behind all appearances and can never be known. Spencer offers it as the meeting point of religion and science: both, he holds, finally acknowledge a power beyond knowledge. He arrived at it, Sidgwick notes, under the influence of Kant as transmitted through the Scottish philosopher Hamilton and the theologian Mansel.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why Suspend the Metaphysicians?

Should metaphysics stop until it is settled whether it is possible at all? Sidgwick asks why metaphysicians alone were suspended, and follows Kant from space and time to the antinomies.

Kant told metaphysicians to suspend their business until the possibility of metaphysics had been settled. Sidgwick finds only one of his reasons sound: mathematics and physics command agreement and make steady progress, and metaphysics does not. Even so, the demand rebounds, since the critical inquirer must also show that his own knowledge is possible. The lectures follow Kant through space and time, substance and causality, rational psychology and the antinomies, and keep pressing on the thing in itself, which Kant calls real though unknown.

  • kantian philosophy
  • metaphysics
  • a priori knowledge
  • space
  • time
  • causality
  • causation
  • substance
  • necessity
  • rational psychology
  • idealism
  • objectivity
  • reason
  • realism

Enter a dialogue

Green's Eternal Mind and Spencer's Unknowable

Is the world the work of an eternal consciousness, or the appearance of a power no one can know? Sidgwick tests the two systems most in vogue in his day, both of which lead back to Kant.

Green held that every human knower is a limited reproduction of an eternal consciousness, and Sidgwick asks how that consciousness can be an object of thought at all, and how a function of an animal organism and an eternal mind using it as a vehicle can be one thing. Spencer, taking his lead from Kant through Hamilton and Mansel, set an Unknowable behind all appearances to reconcile religion and science. Sidgwick finds that Spencer seems to know a great deal about his Unknowable, and that Green treats the plain dualism of mind and matter too slightly.

  • agnosticism
  • consciousness
  • empiricism
  • perception
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • relations
  • matter
  • philosophy of science

Enter a dialogue

Common Sense, the Sophists and the Test of Truth

How can anyone tell truth from error without an infallible test? The essays give up the search for one and trust instead to the ways minds have actually been corrected.

In his Glasgow address Sidgwick defends Thomas Reid, who taught there, against Kant's complaint that Reid and the other answerers of Hume missed the point of Hume's problem. In 'Criteria of Truth and Error' he turns from criteria to verifications drawn from how minds have actually been convinced of error: a belief should survive careful reflection, agree with one's other beliefs, and hold up against the judgment of others. The papers on the Sophists side with George Grote, the historian, that they were a profession rather than a school with shared doctrines.

  • common sense
  • criteria of truth
  • certainty
  • philosophical method
  • history of philosophy
  • sophists
  • rhetoric

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
477
distinct concepts
444
by passages held, corpus-wide
#155

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “empiricism” and “epistemology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
empiricismepistemology22
epistemologyperception15
idealismmetaphysics14
empiricismperception8
epistemologymetaphysics8
kantian philosophytime8
idealismperception7
kantian philosophymetaphysics7
perceptiontime7
epistemologyidealism4
epistemologykantian philosophy4
kantian philosophyperception3
metaphysicstime3
empiricismmetaphysics2
epistemologytime2
empiricismtime1
idealismtime1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1870 The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription

    His answer in print to the question his own resignation from Trinity had raised the year before, published four years before The Methods of Ethics.

     EN
  2. 1874 The Methods of Ethics

    Revised through five editions in Sidgwick's lifetime, this is the book he is read for; his editor called his later Cambridge lectures on Green, Spencer and Martineau supplementary to it.

     EN
  3. 1886 Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers

    The historical companion to The Methods of Ethics: Sidgwick telling the story of the moral debates that book had tried to settle by argument.

     EN
  4. 1891 The Elements of Politics

    A two-part treatise — the principles of legislation first, then the structure of government — that carries the utilitarian reasoning of The Methods of Ethics from private conduct into politics.

     EN
  5. 1898 Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays

    Written mostly for the ethical societies of London and Cambridge between 1888 and 1897, these are Sidgwick's applications of his ethics to questions of everyday conduct, for listeners outside the university.

     EN
  6. 1902 Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau

    Course lectures never meant for print, in which Sidgwick defended the position of The Methods of Ethics against the schools that had risen since it first appeared.

     EN
  7. 1902 Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations

    Where The Methods of Ethics works inside ethics, these lectures map how ethics, metaphysics, psychology and history fit together — the frame around the rest of Sidgwick's philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1905 Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures and Essays you are here EN
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