Henry Sidgwick

So I turned into moral philosophy pretty quickly.

And then it was Henry Sedgwick and also Peter Singer that I'm so happy and lucky to have been working for over 20 years now.

And when you study Henry Sedgwick, the best utilitarian of the 19th century, then of course you end up with hedonism because he was one of the classical hedonists along with Bentham and Mill.

And so I thought, yeah, why not? And once you start studying something carefully, you probably are more willing to accept it as your own theory.

Have you found that people don't necessarily think in terms of philosophy when they're thinking about pleasures they're experiencing?

One member of the Growth Club, a small philosophical discussion society at the University of Cambridge, was particularly interested in Jevons' work and its influence not only on political economy, but even more so on ethics.

This was the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick.

The Grote Club held its meeting at Grote's Vicarage in Trampington, just south of Cambridge.

After dinner, the gentlemen gathered in the reading room for a discussion around a paper read by one of the members.

As one of the younger members of the club recalled, after listening carefully to their friend's exposition, these intellectuals let their

tongues loose and the pace was tremendous.

One evening in the late 1860s, Henry Sidgwick presented a few papers that took Jevons' argument apart directly.

They later made their way to his 1874 book on ethics.

Out of this mess came the one institution that genuinely tried to do things properly, so the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882.

Its first president was Henry Sidgwick, a Cambridge philosophy professor of famously rigid honesty, and its driving spirit was Frederick Myers, a classicist who coined the word telepathy.

Huh.

I wonder why he did that.

Its early membership included serious academics and scientists, people at the top of their fields.

Philosopher Henry Sidgwick became its first president, and people such as Harvard psychologist William James, Nobel laureate Lord Raleigh, and future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour all became involved.

In 1882, I imagine there were quite a few paranormal claims floating around because science was, uh, you know, it was relatively early, so like, oh my gosh, how does this work? Anything a magician does today, a physicist and that magician, y- you know, if he's willing to disclose what he's doing, he could say, "Yeah, I do this," and the physicist goes, "This is how this works." But back then, a magician would just be able to do something, and it's like, how does that work? I don't know.

I put this black rock onto this other one and the thing floats.