HAMILTON, WILLIAM. – Philosopher, born in Glasgow on 8 March 1788, died 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 subsequently (from 1836 until his death) professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
Faithful to the traditionally psychological character of English thought, H. considers fundamental (following 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 seeks to remove from that testimony the character of immediacy, showing that knowledge 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 theory of knowledge. In other words: to know an object is to refer it to something that conditions and limits II. The very logical form of judgment (which H. adopts in a Kantian manner as the typical form of knowledge) demonstrates the relativity of thought by presenting 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 and effect assumes particular importance 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 knowledge which is not explicit in merely spatiotemporal representations, and even less so in the logical-metaphysical concepts of “whole” and “part,” “genus” and “species,” and so on. The recollection of Kant’s Transcendental Analytic is therefore evident in this accentuation of the causal concept. H., however, misunderstands it in the following respect: he does not see in the activity of thought a purely synthetic process that constructs the science of phenomena; rather, he considers consciousness itself a phenomenon, insofar as in reality it does not posit but receives from outside the conditions of its knowledge. Thus, for H., the concept does not become a category, but remains rather an empirical compromise between the intellect and sensory 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 fact, by that assertion, he claims to deny thought not only the possibility of transcending the phenomenon, but also that of posing the problem of the phenomenon: consequently, he closes off the way to understanding not only the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment, but also the deeper meaning of the Critique of Pure Reason itself. As a result, the antinomic contradictions implicit in the thought of the unconditioned and the absolute (of which the human spirit nevertheless contains the most vital need) find for H. no other solution than the act of faith: a faith which, however, far from expressing the profound spirituality of human existence through its reference to pure divine spirituality, represents rather the final surrender of thought in the face of the difficulties of thinking. This explains the fragility of H.’s polemic against post-Kantian idealism, Schelling (v.); it also explains the scant vitality of the theological endeavours of H. himself and of his disciple and continuator Mansel.
Alongside this fundamental psychological theory of knowledge, H.’s thought includes the formalistic elaboration of a logic of concepts, whose relations are restricted, in an anti-Aristotelian sense, to the sole relation of quantity; hence every judgment expresses the relation of extension between two concepts according to the schema of a reversible equation. The result is a deductive mathematism and a calculating logic, reminiscent of Hobbes’nominalism (v.), but now of little importance.
H.’s principal works: Discussions on philosophy and literature (London 1852), Lectures on metaphysics and logic, posthumous (4 vols., ibid. 1859–60).