Alexander, Samuel

Alexander, Samuel, 1859–1938, British philosopher, b. Australia. From 1893 to 1924 he was professor of philosophy at Victoria Univ., Manchester. Strongly influenced by the theory of evolution, Alexander conceived of the world as a single cosmic process in which higher forms of being emerge periodically. The basic principle of this process is space-time, and the result is God. His works include Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Spinoza and Time (1921), Art and the Material (1925), and Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933).

Bibliography

See studies by S. R. Dasgupta (1965) and M. Weinstein (1984).

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Alexander, Samuel 

Born Jan. 6, 1859, in Sydney; died Sept. 13, 1938, in Manchester. English philosopher, neorealist, and one of the founders of the idealistic theory of emergent evolution. The initial point of Alexander’s philosophy is the concept of “space-time” consisting of “point-instants” which must be viewed “not as physical electrons but as metaphysical elements” (Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, 1927, p. 325). According to Alexander, the multiformity of the world arises from “space-time” as a result of sudden leaps (emergence); to explain their ultimate reasons, Alexander arrives at the recognition of God (see “Some Explanations,” Mind, 1921, vol. 30, no. 120, p. 410).

REFERENCES

Voprosy filosofii, 1957, no. 1. (Articles by A. S. Bogomolov, E. F. Pomogaeva and P. S. Trofimov, and Maurice Cornforth).
Bogomolov, A. S. Ideia razvitiia ν burzh. filosofii XIX i XX v. Moscow, 1962, Chapter 5.
McCarthy, J. W. The Naturalism of Samuel Alexander. New York, 1948. (With bibliography.)