Ferrier, James Frederick (1808–1864)

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FERRIER, JAMES FREDERICK
(1808–1864)

James Frederick Ferrier, the Scottish metaphysician, was born in Edinburgh into a wealthy family of lawyers. After studying at the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, he spent some months in Germany. He settled in Edinburgh in 1832 as an advocate, becoming active in the intellectual circle of Sir William Hamilton, which included Thomas De Quincey and "Christopher North" of Blackwood's Magazine. Under this stimulus Ferrier contributed to Blackwood's between 1838 and 1843 the eleven long articles that fill most of the second volume of his Lectures and Remains (2 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1866). In 1845 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy and political economy at the University of St. Andrews. Ferrier issued a drastically revised version of his philosophy in the Institutes of Metaphysic (Edinburgh and London, 1854; 2nd ed., 1856). The Institutes was to some extent affected by Ferrier's commitments in the political and ecclesiastical struggles that then divided Scotland. This social influence is still more marked in the pamphlet defending his position, Scottish Philosophy, the Old and the New (Edinburgh, 1856). Meanwhile, Ferrier elaborated, until incapacitated in 1861, on an impressive series of lectures on Greek philosophy, posthumously published as Volume I of Lectures and Remains.

The first seven Blackwood's articles constitute a unitary work on the philosophy of consciousness. Its starting point is a critique of Thomas Brown's doctrine that it is wrong to regard states of mind, such as emotions, as objects of consciousness. Brown argued that to speak of being conscious of feeling angry is the same thing as to speak of feeling angry. Ferrier pointed out that there is a marked difference between speaking of someone as boiling with rage and speaking of him as being conscious of the boiling rage within him. In the latter case, instead of looking outward at the injustice and brooding on the affront, he looks inward at the consequent irritation in his heart and ceases to brood.

Thus far Ferrier was merely making an intelligent use of the doctrine of the inverse variation of feeling and knowledge proposed by his friend Sir William Hamilton. But as Hamilton noted with approval, Ferrier then went beyond the customary limits of British philosophy by asking what is involved in the shift from unself-conscious anger to self-conscious anger. This self-knowledge does not arise straightforwardly out of ordinary experience. The use of the first personal pronoun, which is the mark of self-knowledge in the proper sense, is something that cannot be learned from the experience of other people and their talk in the same imitative way as the use of a word like table can. The indubitability of self-knowledge arises just because it is not based on observation in the same way that our knowledge of mountains is. Therefore, Ferrier concluded, there is something anomalous about the foundations of self-knowledge. What is it?

In his four Blackwood's articles on the subject of sense perception, contributed between 1841 and 1843, Ferrier gave his problem a definite form by limiting it. To gain light on the nature of self-knowledge he looked into the foundations of the ordinary distinction between act of sense and object of sense. Ferrier's discussion is brilliantly original. The key to the difficulty is that as long as we view each sense field in isolation, no proper distinction can be drawn between the act and the object of sense. Within the visual field alone vision does not stand out as empirically separable from the colors seen; within the tactual field the effort of feeling presents itself as indistinguishable from the solids felt. But when the sense fields are viewed in correlation with one another, seeing separates itself from the colors seen as being connected with something tangible but not visible: the eye. Similarly, feeling distinguishes itself from solidity by being vested in an organ of touch revealed by vision rather than by touch. Ferrier thus argued that the key to self-experience is the peculiar experience of appropriating one's own body in the sense of correlating one's own sense organs. This is reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Like them, Ferrier developed the theme of human freedom, first by reference to the contrast between reflective experience and prereflective experience, then by reference to the contrast between the experience of one's own body and the experience of foreign bodies.

Ferrier was stimulated by Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, but there is a distinctive originality to his position in his attempt to give life and definiteness to their ideas by viewing them in terms of the problems of philosophy posed by Hamilton and Thomas Brown. As De Quincey said, Ferrier's philosophy is "German philosophy refracted through a Scottish medium."

Ferrier's highly original early efforts have been overshadowed for posterity by the respectable academic contributions of his later life. In his Institutes of Metaphysic he moved from a "phenomenological" standpoint, inherited from Thomas Reid by way of Hamilton and Victor Cousin, to a narrowly a priori point of view which, distinguishing sharply between necessary and contingent truth, would restrict philosophy to necessary truth. As a result, the Institutes of Metaphysic omits the analysis of self-knowledge and the experience of one's own body that distinguishes the Blackwood's articles, confining itself to well-worn doctrines that can be expounded in an a priori way, such as the Cartesian cogito and a verifiability principle not unlike that of modern positivism. But Ferrier's later work should not be underestimated. It contains remarkably illuminating discussions of the relations of universals and particulars (rather like that in Henry Mansel), which is carried further in the Lectures on Greek Philosophy. In this work there is also an extremely impressive analysis of the experience of change and movement that in one way anticipates Henri Bergson and in another way looks back to Hegel.

Ferrier's later work was very influential in the late nineteenth century in the English-speaking world and to some extent in France. In particular, the Institutes of Metaphysic provided Shadworth Hodgson with his starting point and most of his leading ideas. Ferrier's early work, unfortunately, escaped notice in the nineteenth century, but a reevaluation of it has begun.

Bibliography

works by ferrier

Ferrier's works are collected in the three-volume Philosophical Works (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1875).

works on ferrier

Arthur Thomson's article "The Philosophy of J. F. Ferrier," in Philosophy 39 (1964): 46–62, reevaluates Ferrier's early work. There is a short biography by E. S. Haldane, James Frederick Ferrier (Edinburgh, 1894). See also The Democratic Intellect, by G. E. Davie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961).

George E. Davie (1967)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy