Hamilton, Sir William (1788-1856: metaphysician)

William Hamilton was born in Scotland in 1788 . He was educated in Glasgow, Scotland, and at Balliol College, Oxford where he was a friend of J G Lockhart, the biographer of Walter Scott. He gained his MA in 1814 and established his claim to baronetcy in 1816 . After touring Germany in 1817 and 1820, he was elected professor of civil history at the University of Edinburgh in 1821 . Articles in the Edinburgh Review made his reputation as a philosopher between 1829-1836 and he was elected to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh in 1836 . He made a great impression in his lecturers, attacking the 'non-intrusion' principle in ecclesiastical controversy in 1843 . He was partly paralysed in 1844 but still managed to edit the works of Reid although Mansell completed these in 1846 . Hamilton's doctrine of the quantification of the predicate was assailed by De Morgan, and that of the unknowability of the infinite by Calderwood. He contributed to psychology and logic theories of the association of ideas, of unconscious mental modifications, and the inverse relation of perception and sensation. He died in 1856 .

Source: Dictionary of National Biography: Index and Epitome (Smith Elder & Co: London, 1903)