CAIRD, EDWARD. - English philosophies, b. at Greenock (Scotland) on 22 March 1835, d. at Oxford on 1 November 1908. He held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1866 to 1893. He subsequently served as rector of Balliol College until 1906.
Caird’s scientific activity, which was eminently historicist, may be considered in two phases. The first, almost exclusively expository, aimed at introducing German philosophy into England. Works belonging to this period include The philosophy of Kant explained and examined with a historical introduction (London 1876); Hegel (Edinburgh 1883–86); The critical philosophy of I. Kant (2 vols., Glasgow 1889), etc. The second phase, marked by a personal reworking of Hegelian thought, was chiefly devoted to the study of religion, which Caird interpreted historically as a dialectical process of consciousness in its three fundamental moments: to the objective moment would correspond Greek polytheism (representative, external); to the subjective moment, Jewish religion (personal, international); and to the synthetic moment, Christianity, in which God would be both immanent and transcendent. These ideas, which also influenced Tyrrell and Loisy, are set forth by Caird mainly in The evolution of religion (2 vols., Glasgow 1893) and The evolution of theology in the Greek philosophers (ibid. 1904), etc.