Richard I. Aaron

Richard Ithamar Aaron, (6 November 1901 – 29 March 1987), was a Welsh philosopher who became an authority on the work of John Locke. He also wrote a history of philosophy in the Welsh language.

Early life and education Born in Blaendulais, Glamorgan, Aaron was the son of a Welsh Baptist draper, William Aaron, and his wife, Margaret Griffith. He was educated at Ystalyfera Grammar School, then at the University of Wales from 1918, where he studied history and philosophy. In 1923 he was elected a Fellow of the university, allowing him to attend Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a DPhil in 1928 for a dissertation on "The History and Value of the Distinction between Intellect and Intuition".

Career In 1926 Aaron was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University College of Swansea.

Aaron produced several more books and articles, including a book in Welsh on the history of philosophy, Hanes athroniaeth—o Descartes i Hegel in 1932.

Other notable publications of Aaron's include "Two Senses of the Word Universal" (1939) and "Our Knowledge of Universals", a study read to the British Academy in 1945 and published in its Proceedings and as a separate monograph. Aaron's fascination with the idea of a universal culminated in The Theory of Universals (1952). Here, he attacks the notion of universals as Platonic forms, but is as critical of Aristotelian realism on essences as he is of nominalism and conceptualism as theories of universals.

In 1952–1953, Aaron was a visiting professor at Yale University. In 1956, he was able to study the third draft of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding at the Pierpont Morgan Library, which led to a substantial addition to the second edition of John Locke, published in 1955. He became a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and president of the Mind Association in the same year. In 1956, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association (publisher of the journal Mind) was held in Aberystwyth, and Aaron gave the inaugural lecture. In 1957 he was elected President of the Aristotelian Society.

Selected works

----- (ed. with J. Gibb) An Early Draft of Locke's Essay, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1936.

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