Hamilton, William(1788–1856)
William Hamilton, the Scottish philosopher and logician, was born in Glasgow and was educated at Glasgow, at Edinburgh, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1811. After leaving Oxford he studied law and in 1813 was admitted to the Scottish bar. He was appointed professor of civil history at the University of Edinburgh in 1821 and was elected to the chair of logic and metaphysics in 1836. Hamilton, a man of stupendous erudition, was strongly influenced by Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant.
Psychology
Hamilton divided "mental modifications, or phenomena" into three classes—the phenomena of knowledge or cognition; the phenomena of feeling, of pleasure and pain; and the phenomena of will or desire, the exertive or connative powers. Knowledge, feeling, and will or desire cannot exist independently of one another. Every state of mind is a combination of all three, although proportions may vary. We can conceive of a being who knows one thing or another but is totally devoid of feeling, desire, and volition; or of a being capable of knowledge and feeling only; but not of a being having the capacity for pleasure and pain and the capacity to will, but lacking the faculty of knowledge.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 1,843 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Hamilton, William (1788–1856) Access Pass.
