Prof. J. H. Muirhead, F.B.A

Abstract

PROF. JOHN HENRY MUIRHEAD, who died on May 24, carried his eighty-five years so lightly, his vigour of mind was until the last so abundant and his sympathy with young life and new ideas so unfailing, that it is hard to think of him as what he was, perhaps the last surviving representative of the Idealist philosophy that had its heyday in the eighteen-eighties and nineties. But as a pupil of Edward Caird in Glasgow and of T. H. Green at Balliol, he had been in the movement from its beginning and was to watch its extending influence far beyond the ranks of academic theory, then, in the last generation, its decline before the criticisms of younger movements. If not one of the leading thinkers of the school, Muirhead was certainly one of its most successful and indefatigable teachers, both directly for more than a generation in university posts and indirectly through his wide personal contacts, through his work for the British Institute of Philosophical Studies and in many other ways, while his writings cover a period of not far short of half a century. Finally, as a foreign critic has remarked (Dr. R. Metz, “A Hundred Years of British Philosophy”), Muirhead “made a distinguished contribution to the history of the idealistic movement. Placing it in a wider intellectual setting, he has sought to understand its origin and development as well as its total significance”. The reference here is especially to his book on “The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy”(1931).