James Hutchison Stirling

Headstone of James Hutchison Stirling in Warriston Cemetery near Edinburgh

James Hutchison Stirling (born June 22, 1820 in Glasgow , † March 19, 1909 in Edinburgh ) was a Scottish philosopher.

Life

Stirling was born as the youngest of six children to textile manufacturer William Stirling and his wife Elizabeth Christie Stirling. At the request of his father, he studied medicine at the University of Glasgow from 1833 to 1842 , but at the same time attended courses in philosophy, classical philology and history. After obtaining his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1842), he began a medical career as an assistant doctor in Pontypool . In 1844 he went to Hirwaun and became a surgeon there in 1846, whereby he always occupied himself with contemporary literature. In 1847 he married Jane Hunter Mair, a longtime friend of the family, with whom he had seven children.

The inheritance received after the death of his father (1851) enabled Stirling to give up his profession as a doctor and devote himself exclusively to his literary studies. Like many of his Scottish contemporaries, he became an ardent admirer of Thomas Carlyle . He followed his advice to learn French and German in order to study contemporary European literature and philosophy more closely. In 1851 he went with his family first to Paris , then to Saint-Malo (1852–1856), and finally to Heidelberg (1856) for a year . These years were mainly devoted to the study of continental, especially contemporary German philosophy.

In 1857 Stirling returned to Great Britain, first to Kensington for three years , then to Edinburgh in 1860, where he was to stay. There he devoted himself intensively to studying and interpreting the work of Hegel , whose thinking had impressed him most during his stay abroad. From these studies, the voluminous work The Secret of Hegel emerged in 1865 , which Stirling quickly made known to a wider public.

From 1888 to 1890 he held the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh , which he published in 1890 under the name Philosophy and Theology .

plant

The work The Secret of Hegel is considered to be the first major study of Hegel in Great Britain, which contributed significantly to the flourishing of the idealistic movement there. In it, Stirling describes the philosophy of David Hume as the climax of the Enlightenment , while he sees Kant already beyond the Enlightenment. Kant laid the foundation for the building of idealism, which was only built and expanded by Hegel. To understand the “secret of Hegel” means to understand how he made explicit the doctrine of the concrete universal, which was only implicit in Kant's critical philosophy.

Fonts

• Sir William Hamilton, or the Philosophy of Perception , 1865
• The Secret of Hegel , 2 vols., 1865
• Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay , Essays, 1868
• As Regards Protoplasm , 1869, 2nd ed. 1872 (directed against Huxley)
• Lectures on the Philosophy of Law , 1873
• Text-book to Kant , 1881 (translation of the Critique of Pure Reason ' with commentary and biography)
• Philosophy in the Poets , 1885
• Philosophy and Theology , 1890
• Darwinism, Workmen and Work , 1894
• What is Thought? or the Problem of Philosophy , 1900
• The Categories , 1903

literature

• AH Stirling: James Hutchison Stirling (1912)
• GD Stormer: Hegel and the secret of James Hutchison Stirling , Idealistic Studies, 9 (Jan 1979), 33-54
• Kirk Willis: Stirling, James Hutchison (1820–1909) , in: Lawrence Goldman (Ed.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004
• Kirk Willis: The introduction and critical reception of Hegelian thought in Britain, 1830-1900 , Victorian Studies, 32 (1988-9), 85-111

Web links

• Anonymous:  James Hutchison Stirling (1820–1909). In: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Stirling, James Hutchison , in: Britannica 1911

Remarks

1. ↑ Cf. Matteo V. d'Alfonso, in: Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Ed.): Handbuch Deutscher Idealismus , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2005, p. 361.