Abstract
In the mid-nineteenth century James Frederick Ferrier, John Grote and James Hutchison Stirling offered idealist accounts of reality that anticipated the influential school of British Idealism later developed by philosophers such as Green and Bradley. These early idealisms included accounts of the self in opposition to the Enlightenment picture of humanity that derived from the “science of man”. The most extensive account was provided by Ferrier, who argued that self-consciousness is the constant concomitant of all experience and the peculiar and defining feature of a person. Whilst offering broadly similar idealist accounts, Grote and Stirling differed from Ferrier in their treatment of other minds. Ferrier’s account of the self must be understood in individualistic terms, while Grote and Stirling allowed for the communality of consciousness.
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Keefe, J. (2016). The Early British Idealists and the Metaphysics of the Self. In: Mander, W., Panagakou, S. (eds) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46671-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46671-6_2
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