William Hamilton 1788 – 1856

Sir William Hamilton, ninth Baronet of Preston, was a Scottish philosopher and the leading British philosophical figure of the mid nineteenth century. Professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, he combined the Scottish common sense tradition with elements drawn from German post-Kantian philosophy and produced a celebrated theory of the relativity of human knowledge: that the absolute and the infinite are not, as such, objects of knowledge for finite minds. His Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic and his voluminous editorial work on the writings of Reid shaped a generation of British and American philosophy.

Sir William Hamilton, ninth baronet of Preston, was born at Glasgow in March 1788, the son of the regius professor of anatomy. He read at Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, took his BA in 1811, was called to the Scottish bar in 1813, and after limited success as an advocate turned to scholarship, becoming professor of civil history at Edinburgh in 1821 and in 1836 succeeding David Ritchie in the chair of logic and metaphysics, which he held until his death. A stroke in 1844 left him partially paralysed but did not prevent him from lecturing.

His works in his lifetime were essays in the Edinburgh Review collected as Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (1852); after his death his pupils published the four-volume Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859–1860), and his annotated editions of Reid (1846) and Dugald Stewart (1854–1858) gave the Scottish school of common sense its most authoritative nineteenth-century form.

Hamilton developed a 'philosophy of the conditioned' on which the human mind can know only the limited and relational, never the absolute or infinite as such, and on which faith — not reason — sustains belief in God; in logic he proposed the doctrine of the quantification of the predicate. His thought, attacked by John Stuart Mill in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), was the dominant academic philosophy in Britain at mid-century. He died at Edinburgh in May 1856.