First published in 1942, Reflections documents the life of John Henry Muirhead and the philosophical age that he observed. The first part of the volume derives from Muirhead’s own autobiographical narrative, left unfinished when he died in May 1940. The second part features two final chapters written by John W. Harvey that comprehensively record the final stages of Muirhead’s life. Harvey’s chapters incorporate Muirhead’s unfinished final years of commentary and begin at the man’s retirement from Birmingham Chair in 1921. As a student and teacher of philosophy, Muirhead’s life ran almost precisely parallel to what he himself refers to as ‘one of the most vivid and important movements in British and American philosophy’. He came into contact with some of the age’s primary thinkers and as such, his own autobiography is important in providing an insight into his contemporary philosophical environment.
First published in 1928, this book reproduces the lectures and addresses that John Henry Muirhead gave on various occasions during the two and a half years he spent as Lecturer of Philosophy on the Mills Foundation at the University of California, USA. The different chapters look at the meaning and general place of Philosophy as a subject of study and the application of its leading conceptions to different areas of modern life, including science and politics. The final chapters however, present two short talks of a different nature, which were addressed to Scottish countrymen, gathered on foreign shores. This book outlines Muirhead's philosophical thoughts and conclusions to which he devoted his life.
First published in 1942, Reflections documents the life of John Henry Muirhead and the philosophical age that he observed. The first part of the volume derives from Muirhead’s own autobiographical narrative, left unfinished when he died in May 1940. The second part features two final chapters written by John W. Harvey that comprehensively record the final stages of Muirhead’s life. Harvey’s chapters incorporate Muirhead’s unfinished final years of commentary and begin at the man’s retirement from Birmingham Chair in 1921. As a student and teacher of philosophy, Muirhead’s life ran almost precisely parallel to what he himself refers to as ‘one of the most vivid and important movements in British and American philosophy’. He came into contact with some of the age’s primary thinkers and as such, his own autobiography is important in providing an insight into his contemporary philosophical environment.
This is Volume II out of three in a collection on Aesthetics. Originally published in 1930, this study is part of the Muirhead library of Philosophy and was was undertaken by the author in the conviction, gathered from a superficial acquaintance with Coleridge's published works, that as a stage in the development of a national form of idealistic philosophy his ideas are far more important than has hitherto been realized either by the educated public or by professed students of the subject. Closer study of them further convinced the author that they formed in his mind a far more coherent body of philosophical thought than he has been anywhere credited with.
Dr. J. Muirhead, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Birmingham, has issued a popular little work on the relation of German Philosophy to the present War. So much has recently been written by English writers against German philosophy - conceived vaguely as a whole - that we are apt to forget that there is as much "German Philosophy" in England or France as in Germany. Professional philosophers in these countries are, of course, quite aware of the fact; so, they are beginning at last to defend German philosophy while denouncing German politics. It is a delicate position to hold amid the fierce prejudices and extremist hatred bred by war. Any such attempt to exercise fairness and discrimination deserves respect and sympathy.Professor Muirhead holds that militarism and imperialism "are not the offspring of what is commonly known as German Philosophy, but on the contrary are the legitimate issue of a violent reaction against all that German Philosophy properly stands for." Thus, for him German philosophy is synonymous with the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel - though, of course, he grudgingly admits that each of these is both inconsistent with himself and irreconcilable with the others. Still, he holds, they agreed in a certain high-souled idealism which is the antithesis of militarism and materialism. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Haeckel, and such like are those who really sowed the needs of militarism. It may be so. But one cannot help remembering Fichte's perfervid expositions of the destiny of the German nation and Hegel's exaggerated doctrine of the State. Also, the Rationalist Press Association, which is the English equivalent of Haeckel's Monistenbund, has been fiercely denouncing German ideas. Thus, it would seem that idealists attribute the war to naturalism and naturalist-philosophers attribute it to idealism.It appears to the present reviewer that both sides err by opposite extremes. The conditions which make war possible are due to that idealess selfishness which puts individual interests before those of society, which values the ambitions of a nation more than the peace of Europe. And this ruthless selfishness of individual and class and nation is the outcome of a creedless ethic. The attempt to construct morality without historical Christianity is common alike to "German Philosophy" and to German Anti-Philosophy. The idealist sees the mote in his naturalist confrère's eye, but what about the beam in his own? - A. J. R., An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 4, No. 14.
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