Keep quiet about it

Alan Ryan

  • Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe by Bart Schultz
    Cambridge, 858 pp, £40.00, June 2004, ISBN 0 521 82967 4

This is an extraordinary – and extraordinarily interesting – book, a model of intellectual biography. Henry Sidgwick’s day job was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is today best known as the author of Methods of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment from Bart Schultz, it occupies barely a quarter of the volume.

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