George Holmes Howison (1834—1916) was an American philosopher who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States. His main work as a philosopher was the "import" of Hegelian philosophy to the US.
Friends and former students of Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy in 1919. Over the years, the lecture series has included talks by distinguished philosophers such as Michael Foucault and Noam Chomsky.
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George Holmes Howison taught a metaphysical theory called Personal Idealism,[1] also called "California Personalism" to distinguish it from the "Boston Personalism" of Borden Parker Bowne. Howison maintained that both impersonal, monistic idealism and materialism run contrary to the moral freedom experienced by persons. Denying the freedom to pursue the ideals of truth, beauty, and "benignant love" undermines every profound human venture, including science, morality, and philosophy. Thus, even personalistic idealism (e.g., that of Borden Parker Bowne or that of Edgar S. Brightman) and realistic personal theism (e.g., that of Thomas Aquinas) are inadequate, for they make finite persons dependent for their existence upon an infinite Person and support this view by an unintelligible doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.[2]
Howison expounded personal idealism in The Limits of Evolution.[3] Howison created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, whom Howison described not as the creator or ruler of the universe but as the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. It is no wonder Howison found no disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was heretical, or the non-religious, who thought his proposals too religious; only J. M. E. McTaggart's idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism seem to resemble Howison's personal idealism. [4]