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Sir William Hamilton

William Hamilton epitomizes very clearly the challenge that contemporary philosophers face in studying their nineteenth-century predecessors. There can be few thinkers who have been the subject of such a massive reversal of reputational fortune as Hamilton, from being heralded in his day as a philosophical genius to being ignored by subsequent generations as a pompous blunderer. The chapter examines the central principles of Hamilton’s metaphysics, with special reference to his assertion of the relativity of knowledge and the law of the conditioned. The chapter considers how his metaphysical system relates both to that of Kant’s Critical philosophy and the Scottish common sense school, and examines its application to the specific concepts of substance and adjective, space and time, causality, free will and God.