Hamilton, William

HAMILTON, WILLIAM. - Philosopher, b. in Glasgow on 8 March 1788, d. in Edinburgh on 6 May 1856. After studying in his native city and at Oxford, he was first a lawyer, then (from 1821) professor of history, and later (from 1836 until his death) of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Faithful to the traditionally psychological character of English thought, H. regards as fundamental (following in the footsteps of Reid and in opposition to Hume's scepticism) the instinctive testimony of consciousness, which posits an irreducible duality between the objective world and the perceiving subject; but, aware of Kant's teaching, he wishes to strip that testimony of its character of immediacy, showing how knowing is not absolute and unconditioned, but always limited and relative. «To think is to condition»: this is the fundamental proposition of H.'s epistemology. That is: to know an object is to refer it to something that conditions and limits it. The very logical form of judgment (which H. adopts in the Kantian manner as the typical form of knowing) demonstrates the relativity of thought by its positing itself as the expression of the synthetic unity of two terms. In this assertion of the relativity of thought as thought of the finite and the conditioned, the concept of cause-effect takes on particular prominence in H.'s mind, inasmuch as it represents almost the paradigm of the conditioning activity of cognitive thought.

Indeed, the concept of cause-effect expresses that reciprocal dynamic reference of the objective determinations of knowing, which is not explicit in merely spatio-temporal representations and is even less so in the logical-metaphysical concepts of «whole» and «part», «genus» and «species», and so on. Evident therefore, in this emphasis on the causal concept, is the recollection of the Kantian Transcendental Analytic. Which is, however, misunderstood by H. in this respect: that he does not see in the activity of thought a pure synthetic process, which constructs the science of phenomena; but he regards consciousness itself as a phenomenon, inasmuch as in reality it does not posit, but undergoes from outside, the conditions of its knowing. The concept thus does not become, for H., a category, but rather remains an empirical compromise between the intellect and sensible observation. Hence, when H. maintains with Kant that there is no knowledge of the unconditioned, he shows that he interprets Kantian thought too literally, since in effect with that affirmation he claims to deny to thought not only the possibility of transcending the phenomenon, but also that of positing the problem of the phenomenon: so that he precludes the way to understand not only the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment, but also the deepest sense of the Critique of Pure Reason itself. Consequently, the antinomic contradictions implicit in the thought of the unconditioned and the absolute (of which nonetheless the most vivid exigency is immanent in the human spirit) find for H. no other solution than the act of faith: of a faith, however, which, far from expressing the profound spirituality of human existence through its reference to pure divine spirituality, represents rather the final renunciation of thought before the difficulties of its thinking. This explains the fragility of H.'s polemic against post-Kantian idealism, and particularly against Schelling (v.); and it also explains the scant vitality of the theological attempts of H. himself and of his disciple and continuator Mansel.

Alongside this fundamental psychological epistemology there stands, in H.'s thought, the formalistic elaboration of a logic of concepts, whose relations are limited, in an anti-Aristotelian sense, to the sole relation of quantity: whence every judgment expresses the relation of extension between two concepts in the schema of a reversible equation. The result is a deductive mathematism and a calculating logic, which recall the nominalism of Hobbes (v.), but are by now of scant importance.

Principal works of H.: Discussions on philosophy and literature (London 1852), Lectures on metaphysics and logic, posthumous (4 vols., ibid. 1859-60).

Vittorio Sainati