Philosopher
Herbert Spencer
Overview
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900: "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Works by Herbert Spencer you can read
- Essays
- First Principles
- The Data of Ethics
- Illustrations of Universal Progress
- The Philosophy of Style
- The Right to Ignore the State
- The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
- Essays on education and kindred subjects
- The Factors of Organic Evolution
Philosophers who discussed Herbert Spencer
- Albert Schweitzer
- Kitarō Nishida
- Thomas Carlyle
- Auguste Comte
- Henri Bergson
- George H. Smith
- Murray Rothbard
- Josiah Warren
- T. H. Green
- Swami Vivekananda
- Peter Kropotkin
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Wilhelm Dilthey
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- William James
- Fernando Pessoa
- Duration (philosophy)
- John Fiske (philosopher)
- Jean-Marie Guyau
- Chauncey Wright
- Petre P. Negulescu
- Vladimir Dvorniković
- Antonio Caso Andrade
- Kieran Egan (philosopher)
Ideas Herbert Spencer discusses
- Austrian school of economics
- Friedrich Hayek
- G. E. Moore
- Anarchism
- George Eliot
- Auguste Comte
- Second law of thermodynamics
- Henri Bergson
- Polish Positivism
- Philosophy
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- Isaac Newton
- John Stuart Mill
- Antipositivism
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Karl Marx
- Fin de siècle
- Latin
- Leo Tolstoy
- Marxism
- Max Weber
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Margaret Thatcher
- Methodism
Place in the tradition
Part of Agnosticism.