John Grote(5 May 1813,Beckenham– 21 August 1866,Trumpington, Cambridgeshire) was anEnglishmoral philosopher andAnglicanclergyman.
Life and career
editThe son of a banker, John Grote was younger brother to the historian, philosopher and reformerGeorge Grote.He was educated at Beckenham School, Kent. He then went up toTrinity College,Cambridge,in 1831, graduating with a first-class degree in the Classics Tripos in 1835, and became a fellow of Trinity in 1837.[1]From 1847 until his death, he was vicar ofTrumpington,where he was a neighbour of his close friendRobert Leslie Ellis,the paralysed mathematician and Bacon scholar. In 1855, Grote succeededWilliam WhewellasKnightbridge professor of moral philosophyat Cambridge University.
Grote published relatively little during his life: volume I ofExploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Scienceappeared in 1865, butAn Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophywas only published posthumously (1870). Grote's literary executor and editor,Joseph Bickersteth Mayor,also put together aTreatise on Moral Ideals(1876) and volume II ofExploratio Philosophica(1900), and married his niece, Alexandrina.[2]
A philosophicalidealistand opponent ofutilitarianism(as befitted his Cambridge and Anglican clerical identity), Grote was nevertheless happy to admit the new experimental psychology of someone likeJohn Stuart Mill's discipleAlexander Bain– as long as such 'phenomenal' and more properly 'philosophical' investigations were not conflated with each other. Grote had the (perhaps unenviable) distinction of coining the word 'relativism', though he did not use it in quite the same sense as it is used today.
Grote was frequently acknowledged as a major influence byMichael Oakeshott,and had an important influence on a diverse group of philosophers and scholarship emerging from Cambridge University.[3]
Publications
editBooks
edit- (1865)Exploratio Philosophica: Part I.
- (1870)An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy.
- (1876)A Treatise on the Moral Ideals.
- (1872)Sermons.
- (1900)Exploratio Philosophica: Part II.
References
edit- ^"Grote, John (GRT831J)".A Cambridge Alumni Database.University of Cambridge.
- ^"Obituary: Professor Joseph Mayor".The Times.1 December 1916. p. 11.
- ^"A trailblazer rescued from a footnote".6 July 2007.
Further reading
edit- Gibbins, John R. (2007)John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought,Imprint Academic, Exeter.
- MacDonald, Laughlin D. (1966)John Grote: A Critical Estimate of his Writings,Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.