CAIRD, EDWARD. - English philosopher, b. at Greenock (Scotland) on 22 March 1835, d. at Oxford on 1 Nov. 1908. From 1866 to 1893 he held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He subsequently served as rector of Balliol College until 1906.
The scholarly activity of C., eminently historicist in character, may be considered in two phases. The first, almost exclusively expository, was directed toward introducing German philosophy into England. To this period belong 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, characterized by a personal re-elaboration of Hegelian thought, was devoted above all to the study of the religious fact, which C. interpreted historically as a dialectical process of consciousness in its three fundamental moments: the objective moment would correspond to Greek polytheism (representative, external); the subjective to the Jewish religion (personal, internal); the synthetic to the Christian religion, in which God would be both immanent and transcendent. These ideas, which were also to influence Tyrrel and Loisy, are set forth by C. principally in The evolution of religion (2 vols., Glasgow 1893); The evolution of theology in the greek philosophers (ibid. 1904), etc.