Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

Born Oct. 10, 1873, in Berlin; died Dec. 30, 1962, in Baltimore. American idealist philosopher. Exponent of critical realism. Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (1901–08), the University of Missouri (1908–10), and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1910–38). President of the American Philosophical Association (1916–17). Founder and editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas (1940).

Lovejoy criticized subjective idealism, the New Realism, the pragmatism of J. Dewey, and behaviorism. In his view, philosophy is inconceivable without postulating the independent existence of the external world. Lovejoy represented the cognitive process in the form of an “epistemological triangle,” including the perceiving subject (percipient), the object taken on faith (the physical world), and “sense data” which mediate the cognitive process and are identified by Lovejoy with perception. Sense data conventionally present the properties of external reality, and knowledge of these properties makes it possible for the subject to orient himself in the world. Thus, Lovejoy develops a peculiar variation of the idealist theory of symbols. Lovejoy upheld the theory of emergent evolution.