author
James Hutchison Stirling
1820–1909
A Scottish thinker who helped open Hegel’s philosophy to English-speaking readers, he moved from medicine into a long career of philosophical writing and debate. His best-known book, The Secret of Hegel, made him a key figure in the spread of idealist thought in Britain and America.
1 Audiobook
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
by Thomas Henry Huxley, George F. (George Frederick) Barker, E. D. (Edward Drinker) Cope, James Hutchison Stirling, John Tyndall
About the author
Born in Glasgow on 22 June 1820, he studied first at the University of Glasgow and then in medicine, qualifying in Edinburgh before working as a surgeon in Wales. After receiving an inheritance in the early 1850s, he left medical practice and spent several years studying in France and Germany, turning his full attention to philosophy.
He is remembered chiefly for The Secret of Hegel (1865), a work that gave a major push to the study of Hegel in Britain and the United States. He also wrote on Kant and later delivered the Gifford Lectures, published as Philosophy and Theology, showing the wide range of his interests across German idealism, religion, and metaphysics.
Though never a university professor, he became an important public intellectual in nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. He died on 19 March 1909, leaving behind a reputation as one of the early and energetic interpreters of German philosophy for English readers.