Alexander, Samuel(1859–1938)
The British realist metaphysician Samuel Alexander was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and was educated at Wesley College, Melbourne. He came to England in 1877 on a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read mathematics, classics, and philosophy (literae humaniores). In 1882 he was elected to a fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, becoming the first Jew to be a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college. His earliest work, the Green Prize essay in moral philosophy, subsequently published as Moral Order and Progress (1889), shows the influence of the idealist ethics dominant in Oxford at the time. But he soon began moving toward an approach to philosophy that could be more closely related to the development of the empirical sciences, particularly biology and psychology. He gave up his fellowship and spent a year in Hugo Münsterberg's psychological laboratory at Freiburg, Germany, continuing in private study until his election to the chair of philosophy at Owens College (later the Victoria University of Manchester) in 1893. He held the chair until his retirement in 1924 and lived in Manchester until his death in 1938, a beloved, influential, and, indeed, legendary figure in both city and university.
Empirical Metaphysics
Alexander wrote occasional papers and a small book on John Locke, but it was not until 1920 that he published his major work, Space, Time and Deity (delivered as the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow in 1915).
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