Henry Longueville Mansel

Henry Longueville Mansel (6 October 1820 – 30 July 1871)

Work The philosophy of Mansel, like that of Sir William Hamilton, was mainly due to Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Reid. Like Hamilton, Mansel maintained the purely formal character of logic, the duality of consciousness as testifying to both self and the external world, and the limitation of knowledge to the finite and "conditioned." His doctrines were developed in his edition of Aldrich's Artis logicae rudimenta (1849) – his chief contribution to the reviving study of Aristotle – and in his Prolegomena logica: an Inquiry into the Psychological Character of Logical Processes (1851, 2nd ed. enlarged 1860), in which the limits of logic as the "science of formal thinking" are rigorously determined.

A summary of Mansel's philosophy is contained in his article "Metaphysics" in the 5th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1860). He also wrote "Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness Phenomenal and Real" (4th ed., 1883), 408pps, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black The Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866) in reply to John Stuart Mill's criticism of Hamilton; Letters, Lectures, and Reviews (ed. Chandler, 1873), The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries (ed. Joseph Barber Lightfoot, 1875, with a biographical sketch by Lord Carnarvon).