Edward Caird 1835 – 1908

Edward Caird was a Scottish Hegelian philosopher, long-time professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and from 1893 master of Balliol College, Oxford, in succession to Benjamin Jowett. His Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant and Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant offered the most comprehensive nineteenth-century English-language reading of Kant through Hegelian eyes, while his The Evolution of Religion and The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers interpreted religion and Greek thought as the self-development of spirit. He shaped a generation of British Idealists and was a major tutor to several future leaders of British public life.

Edward Caird was born at Greenock on the Firth of Clyde in March 1835, the seventh son of a shipbuilder, and the younger brother of the philosophical theologian John Caird. He read at Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett, was elected a fellow of Merton in 1864, returned to Glasgow as professor of moral philosophy in 1866, and in 1893 succeeded Jowett as Master of Balliol, a post he held until 1907.

His major works are A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (1877; greatly expanded in 1889 as The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant), Hegel (1883), The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte (1885), the two volumes of his Glasgow Gifford Lectures The Evolution of Religion (1893), and the late St Andrews Gifford Lectures The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers (1904). His long teaching at Glasgow trained an entire generation of British and American idealists.

Caird gave the most careful nineteenth-century English-language exposition of Kant, read his way back from Kant to Hegel, and presented the absolute idealism of the Hegelian tradition as the natural completion of the critical philosophy. With T. H. Green and his brother John he was the founding figure of British idealism; among his pupils were John Dewey, R. B. Haldane, Henry Jones, John MacCunn, and Bernard Bosanquet. He died at Oxford in November 1908.