Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel (born October 6, 1820 in Cosgrove (Northamptonshire) , † July 1, 1871 ibid) was an English philosopher and cleric .

Life

Henry Longueville Mansel came to Cosgrove , Northamptonshire on October 6, 1820, as the fourth child and eldest son of Henry Longueville Mansel (senior), who ran a school in Cosgrove, and his wife, Maria Margaret, daughter of Admiral Robert Moorsom World. After graduating from Merchant Taylors' School in Northwood (now Hillingdon ), Mansel was admitted to St John's College at Oxford University . There he passed both parts of the trip with the highest honors and then worked as a tutor for his college. This was followed by his appointment as lecturer in moral and metaphysical philosophy at Magdalen College in 1855, also in Oxford, and as Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy in 1859. As a university professor, he campaigned against the reform of the university and the increasingly widespread teachings in Oxford Hegel . In 1867 he followed Arthur Penrhyn Stanley as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, followed by his appointment as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1868. Also in 1868 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The offices at Oxford University he held until his death on July 1, 1871 in Cosgrove.

philosophy

Mansel's philosophy developed primarily on the basis of the works of Aristotle , Immanuel Kant and Thomas Reid . Similar to his contemporary, the Scottish metaphysician William Hamilton , Mansel also retained the exclusively formal character of logic, the dualism between the consciousness of the self and the consciousness of the external environment and the fundamental limitation of all human knowledge as fundamental pillars of his thinking. Mansel developed his philosophical convictions in Aldrich's Artis logicae rudimenta (1849), his essential contribution to the reception of Aristotelian work, as well as in his Prolegomena logica (1851), in which he conscientiously explored the limits of logic as the science of formal thought .

In his Bampton Lectures on the Limits of Religious Thought (1858) Mansel looked at Christian theology from the perspective of metaphysical agnosticism, which he believed to be found in the Critique of Kant and in Hamilton's Philosophy of the Unconditional . Mansel differs from Kant, however, in that he regards knowledge of the self as experience. According to Mansel, God, as a transcendent being, stands outside the limits of human knowledge, since man is unable to recognize the supersensible - an argument for which Mansel was highly valued by the agnostic Thomas Henry Huxley . From this Mansel concludes that man can never (know) God completely on earth. Nevertheless, God had communicated his will to people in the form of the holy scriptures, which is why they would evade any criticism and would have to guide people's faith. These beliefs led to a bitter argument with theologian Frederick Denison Maurice .

A summary of Mansel's philosophy can be read in his article Metaphysics in the 5th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1850).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ L. Stephen: Mansel, Henry Longueville . In: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 , Volume 5, 1885.
2. ↑ L. Stephen: Mansel, Henry Longueville . In: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 , Volume 5, 1885.
3. ^ R. Le Poidevin: Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-957526-8 .
4. ↑ http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/archives/collect/10ma85-1.html