Samuel Alexander Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Samuel Alexander was born on 6 January 1859 in Sydney, New South Wales, to a Jewish family that soon moved to Melbourne. His father died before he was born, and his mother brought up the children with an emphasis on learning and self-discipline. In Melbourne he excelled at school and won distinctions that enabled him to continue his studies in Britain. In 1877 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where the combination of rigorous classical training and a vibrant philosophical culture shaped his early outlook. At Oxford he came under the influence of the moral philosopher T. H. Green and the guidance of the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett. Both men were central to his formation: Green as a source of intellectual challenge and Jowett as a mentor who encouraged breadth of reading and clarity of prose.

Oxford Fellow and Early Writings
Alexander took first-class honors and in 1882 was elected to a fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, widely noted as the first Jew to hold a fellowship at an Oxbridge college. During this period he absorbed the dominant British Idealism of the time yet began to press away from it. His Moral Order and Progress (1889) announced a temperament inclined toward a realist treatment of ethics and psychology, critical of the grand metaphysical system-building associated with figures like F. H. Bradley. While respecting the moral seriousness of Green and the dialectical power of Bradley, Alexander probed experience for its layered, evolving character rather than seeking a single unifying Absolute.

Manchester and the Building of a Department
In 1893 Alexander accepted the chair of philosophy at Owens College, Manchester (which soon became part of the University of Manchester). There he spent the rest of his career, turning Manchester into a major center of philosophical study. He was an exacting but generous teacher, attentive to the growth of younger scholars. Among those shaped by his teaching was John Laird, who carried forward a realist outlook in his own work. Alexander also played a wide role in the city's intellectual and cultural life, fostering links between the university and learned societies, and encouraging serious public discussion of art, literature, and science.

Philosophical Outlook: Realism and Emergence
Alexander's mature system took shape during the first decades of the twentieth century, when British philosophy was shifting away from idealism toward realism. His work participated in that shift, alongside contemporaries such as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, though he retained a temperament distinct from their analytic style. He described the world as fundamentally spatiotemporal: space-time is the basic stuff of reality. From this base, new qualities emerge at higher levels of complexity. Matter, life, consciousness, and value arise in an order of emergent evolution. Mental life does not dissolve into physics, yet it remains continuous with it; novelty is real and irreducible, but it grows out of the lower levels.

Space, Time, and Deity
These ideas found their most elaborate formulation in his Gifford Lectures, delivered at Glasgow and published as Space, Time, and Deity (1920). The two volumes argue that deity is not a transcendent creator standing outside the order of nature; rather, the divine is a quality toward which the world is moving, the ideal limit of value in an evolving universe. The book's synthesis of metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory offered a naturalistic yet nonreductive picture that helped shape the period's debates on emergent evolution. Thinkers such as C. D. Broad and C. Lloyd Morgan, working on related questions of levels and novelty, discussed themes that Alexander had placed at the center of philosophical attention.

Leadership and Influence
Alexander's public roles reflected his standing in British philosophy. He served as President of the Aristotelian Society from 1908 to 1911, presiding over meetings where competing views of realism, idealism, and the new logic met in debate. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1930 he received the Order of Merit, an honor that recognized his contributions to learning. His later book, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933), extended his emergentist framework into aesthetics and ethics, presenting beauty as a higher-order quality that crowns but does not negate the material and mental bases on which it arises.

Teaching, Style, and Personal Bearing
Those who studied with Alexander remembered a lecturer who demanded clarity about first principles yet tolerated bold speculative moves if argued with care. He insisted on historical literacy, returning to Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hume to test contemporary claims. Without the polemical edge that marked some of his contemporaries, he preferred steady articulation of a system that made space for science, art, and ordinary experience alike. In seminar rooms and society meetings he conversed with students and colleagues patiently, often reducing a tangle of objections to a sequence of manageable questions.

Later Years and Legacy
Alexander retired from his chair in the mid-1920s but remained active in writing and discussion. He continued to refine his account of value and to defend emergentism against both materialist reduction and idealist revival. He died in Manchester on 13 September 1938. His legacy endures in several strands: the institutional strength he helped build at Manchester; the emergentist approach that reappears in philosophy of mind and the sciences of complexity; and the example of a naturalistic metaphysics that leaves room for ideals. The Samuel Alexander Building at the University of Manchester stands as a material reminder of his influence there, while Space, Time, and Deity continues to be read for its grand attempt to think the world as a single evolving order in which new forms, including mind and value, genuinely arise.

Our collection contains 26 quotes who is written by Samuel, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Deep - Free Will & Fate - Knowledge.