Samuel Alexander (January 6, 1859 - September 13, 1938) was an Australian-born philosopher. January 6 is the 6th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1859 is a common year starting on Saturday. ... September 13 is the 256th day of the year (257th in leap years). ... 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ...

His work

Two key concepts for Alexander are those of an 'emergent quality' and the idea of 'emergent evolution':

"As existents within Space-Time, minds enter into various relations of a perfectly general character with other things and with one another. These account for the familiar features of mental life: knowing, freedom, values and the like. In the hierarchy of qualities the next higher quality to the highest attained is deity. God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence." - Space, Time and Deity [1920] Vol. II, p. 428

His task, as in any metaphysical theory, was to account for every aspect of existing reality in the simplest and most economical basis. Alexander's idea was to start with Space and Time each of which he regarded as inconceivable without the other, in fact he saw them as mutually equivalent. Out of this pure Space-Time emerges, through a process Alexander describes simply as 'motion', the stuff and matter that make up our material world:

"Space-Time, the universe in its primordial form, is the stuff out of which all existents are made. It is Space-Time with the characters which we have found it to reveal to experience. But it has no 'quality' save that of being spatio-temporal or motion." - Space, Time and Deity [1920] Vol. I, p. 342

"Motion is not a succession of point-instants, but rather a point-instant is the limiting case of a motion." - ibid p. 321

"Point-instants are real but their separateness from one another is conceptual. They are in fact the elements of motion and in their reality are inseparable from the universe of motion; they are elements in a continuum." - ibid p. 325

"For Time makes Space distinct and Space makes Time distinct... Space or Time, may be regarded as supplying the element of diversity to the element of identity supplied by the other." - ibid p. 195

Alexander absolutizes Space-Time, and even speaks of it as a "stuff’ of which things are made. At the same time he also says that Space-Time can be called Motions -- not "motion" in the singular, but complexes of motions with kaleidoscopic changes within a continuum. So one might say that for Alexander motion is primitive, and Space and Time are defined through relations between motions.

Alexander asked the question:

"How far a science of order could be founded on this bare conception of ordered parts of Space-Time I do not know. But at any rate the more comprehensive theorems of speculative mathematics at the present time do not thus proceed. They appear to use the conception of Space and Time not as being stuffs, as we have taken them to be, within which there are relations of the parts of Space and Time themselves, but as relational in the sense that they are relations between things or entities. This is the antithesis between absolute and relational Space and Time." - ibid p. 168.

The question went largely unanswered and his work is mostly ignored (or, at best, little known) these days.

Alexander was a contemporary of Alfred North Whitehead and mentored others who went on to become major figures in 20th century British philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861, Ramsgate, Kent, UK – December 30, 1947, Cambridge, MA) was a British mathematician who evolved into a philosopher. ...

References

• Serle, Percival (1949) Alexander, Samuel In Dictionary of Australian Biography. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. From Project Gutenberg Australia

The Dictionary of Australian Biography, first published in 1949, is a reference work by Percival Serle containing information on notable people associated with Australian history. ... Project Gutenberg of Australia is an organisation related to Project Gutenberg. ...

External links

• John Slater's Introduction to the Collected Works of Samuel Alexander has some biographical details on Alexander's life.
• Article by recent occupier of Alexander's chair at the University of Manchester discussing the legacy of Whitehead and Alexander.