Samuel Alexander
Samuel Alexander ( born January 6, 1859 in Sydney, † September 13, 1938 in Manchester ) was an Australian-born British philosopher.
Life
Samuel Alexander was born in 1859 in the emerging Australian metropolis Sydney, third child of Samuel Alexander Sattler and his wife Eliza born Sloman. Both parents were of Jewish descent. His father died before his birth. 1863/64, Eliza Alexander moved with her children to Melbourne.
From 1866 to 1871 Samuel Alexander received private lessons, after which he came to the Wesley College. Two years later, in 1873, he enrolled in art at the University of Melbourne, but he also heard lectures in mathematics, science and natural philosophy. In 1877 he went to England to study mathematics and philosophy at Balliol College in Oxford.
His first major publication morality Order and Progress (1889 ) is based on its award-winning dissertation. It enabled him in 1893 to the University of Manchester for a professorship in philosophy. There he lived and worked until his retirement in 1924. Other important publications at this time are the work of Space, Time and Deity (1920 ), based on the Gifford Lectures held by him ( 1916-1918 ) is based, and a collection of different essays on ethics and aesthetics titled Beauty and the Other Forms of Value ( 1933). Samuel Alexander died in 1938 in Manchester, the city where he had spent most of his life.
Philosophy
Samuel Alexander's philosophy is based on a strong naturalistic approach. He was impressed by the scientific - especially science - knowledge gains his time. These were for Alexander the starting point to develop a coherent and comprehensive scientific system for other areas. In addition, he worked on a wide range of human experience and philosophical topics. He left only essays on metaphysics and philosophy of science also works on religion, art and ethics. His main concern was doing in the development of a common language and methodology to organize all areas of human experience, to relate and better understand. Aim of philosophy is the picture of any experience for Alexander.
They often use the technique of analogy to the application, with the help of Alexander scientific knowledge of his time will be transferring from the fields of physics and biology to other planes of existence such as morality and art.
Development and Evolution
A key assumption in Alexander's philosophy is the constant evolution to ever higher emergent " levels of existence ". The man known layers are the space-time, the physico- chemical matter, life and mind. Each layer includes properties ( quality ), which are not to be found on top of each deeper level. This theory also includes with a that man is with his spirit and its values not the endpoint of this development. The world must therefore not - as in metaphysics since Kant - intended by the Spirit and are thereby limited. Only if we introduce a hierarchy for these weights, the world is " demystified " by the thought of materialistic evolution. But even if human values could be ultimately explained in terms of the motions of the atoms, so they are not themselves " movements of the atoms ." In an effort in his philosophy equivalent to map all forms of experience, Samuel Alexander rejects a reductionism.
Evolutionary emergence
Alexander summarizes all drives and impulses that lead to science, to God or to art, as urge for development to a higher level with the concept together nisus. This urge is every being inherently and can also be described as the higher level of attraction. Nisus is the unifying concept in Alexander's metaphysics. In this concept, the evolutionary emergence thus unite metaphysics and aesthetics. So based after Alexander also the artistic work on instincts. On the other hand, the aesthetic is the human form of lavish creativity of the universe.