HAMILTON, William. - Philosopher, b. in Glasgow on 18 March 1788, d. in Edinburgh on 6 May 1856. After studying in his native city and at Oxford, he first practised law, then (from 1821) became professor of history, and later (from 1836 until his death) professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
Faithful to the traditionally psychological character of English thought, H. considers the instinctive testimony of consciousness as fundamental (following Reid and in antithesis to Hume’s scepticism), positing an irreducible quality between the objective world and the perceiving subject. However, he seeks to divest that testimony of its immediacy, not only departing from Kant’s teaching but also showing how knowing is not absolute and unconditioned, but always limited and relative. “To think is to posit conditions” (to think is to condition): this is the fundamental proposition of H.’s gnoseology. That is, to know an object is to relate it to something that conditions and limits II. The very logical form of judgment (which H. assumes, in a Kantian manner, as the typical form of knowing) demonstrates the relativity of thought by its very nature as an 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 and effect assumes particular prominence in H.’s mind, insofar as it represents almost the paradigm of the conditioning activity of cognitive thought.
Indeed, the concept of cause and effect expresses that reciprocal dynamic reference of the objective determinations of knowing which is not explicit in mere spatio-temporal representations, nor is it in the logical-metaphysical concepts of “whole” and “part,” “genus” and “species,” and so on. It is thus evident, in this emphasis on the causal concept, the recollection of Kant’s Transcendental Analytic. Yet H. misunderstands it in this respect: he does not see in the activity of thought a pure synthetic process that constructs the science of phenomena; rather, he considers consciousness itself a phenomenon, inasmuch as in reality it does not posit but rather undergoes from without the conditions of its knowing. For H., the concept does not thus become a category, but remains rather an empirical compromise between the intellect and sensible observation. Hence, when H. maintains, with Kant, that there is no knowledge of the unconditioned, he demonstrates that he interprets Kantian thought too literally, for in effect that assertion pretends to deny to thought not only the possibility of transcending the phenomenon, but also that of posing the problem of the phenomenon itself: so that he closes off the path to understanding 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 there is nonetheless an immanent and most lively exigency in the human spirit) find for H. no other solution than an act of faith: yet this faith, 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 own thinking. This explains the fragility of H.’s polemic against post-Kantian idealism, and particularly against Schelling (v.); and it also explains the limited vitality of the theological attempts of H. himself and of his disciple and follower Mansel.
Alongside this fundamental psychologistic gnoseology, H. developed a formalistic elaboration of a logic of concepts, whose relations are limited, in an anti-Aristotelian sense, solely to the relation of quantity: so that every judgment expresses the relation of extension between two concepts within the schema of a reversible equation. The result is a mathematical deductive logic and a calculative logic, reminiscent of Hobbes’s nominalism (v.), but now of little importance.
Principal works by H.: *Discussions on philosophy and literature* (London 1852), *Lectures on metaphysics and logic*, posthumous (4 vols., ibid. 1859–60).