BAILLIE, JAMES. - English philosopher, b. Oct. 24, 1872, d. at Weybridge on June 9, 1940. From 1902 to 1924 he was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and from 1924 to 1938 vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. He belongs to the English neo-Hegelian school (absolute idealism with religious overtones), but with a personal note, especially in the second phase of his thought, in which he moves away from pure Hegelianism (represented by the works The origin and significance of Hegel's logic, London-New York 1901; An outline of the idealistic construction of experience, ibid. 1906), and is led to meditate on the problem of the nature and destiny of concrete man, grasped in his problematic character and in his limits, without the presupposition of the universal rationality of the real (Studies in human nature, London 1921). He translated Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (revised ed., ibid. 1931).
Philosophy, according to B., is «the attempt to reach a single and full vision of man and of his world»
which stand in a relation of active and reciprocal relationship. To this relationship the whole of human experience in all its forms is reduced, each of which (sense experience, moral, scientific, etc.) does not determine the other and does not exhaust man and his world in its totality. Truth for man is a gradual, risky conquest, always incomplete. No form can escape the dangers of error or represent the fullness of individuality even if one form realizes it better than another. Religion understood as «consciousness of the relation with the transcendent», in which the individual attains a greater fullness, represents the highest form of experience.
BIBL: N. Abbagnano, Il nuovo idealismo inglese e americano, Naples 1926; J. H. Muirhead, Filosofi inglesi contemporanei, Milan 1939; M. F. Sciacca, La filosofia, oggi, ibid. 1945, pp. 403-407.
Michele Federico Sciacca