Dawes Hicks


George Dawes Hicks FBA was a British philosopher who was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at University College, London from 1904 until 1928 and professor emeritus thereafter until his death.

Biography

Hicks, eldest son of solicitor Christopher Hicks, was born in Shrewsbury on 14 September 1862 and educated at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford He initially went on to study law within his father's legal practice. Hicks won a scholarship and went, in 1884, to Owens College Manchester to study philosophy. He did so under Robert Adamson "whose philosophical scholarship and acuteness exercised the most radical and lasting effect upon his. pupil's life and teaching". Hicks graduated in 1888 with first class honours. Hicks then went to Manchester College, Oxford and followed the lectures of Wallace, Nettleship. and Cook Wilson.
Elected a Hibbert Scholar 1891–96, Hicks did further research at the University of Leipzig under Wundt, Heinze, and Volelt and assisted Meumann in his experimental investigations on apprehension of time. Hicks also advanced his earlier studies in physiology but concentrated his greater efforts on a detailed textual study of Kant. He gained his PhD at Leipzig in 1896 with a which was to be published the following year.
On his return from Germany in 1897 Hicks became minister of Unity Church in Islington until 1903, and lectured for the London School of Ethics and Sociology. In 1904 he was made Litt.D. by Manchester University and was appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. at University College, London. Hicks was the first person to fill the position which had lain vacant since UCL first advertised for two Chairs in philosophy in 1827. Carveth Read then the Grote Professor of Mind and Logic, as Jonathan Wolff reports, persuaded the College to make such an appointment and thus fulfill "for the first time the original conception of the Department".
During his time at UCL, Hicks continued to live, at least partly, in Cambridge where he regularly lectured at the university, under the auspices of the Faculty of Moral Science, on Psychology and on the Philosophy of Kant. He also "as a labour of love" gave annual lectures at Carmarthen College which were to be published in 1928 under the title "Ways towards the Spiritual Life".
S.V. Keeling describes Hicks as being, as a teacher "a man of single-mind, wholly engrossed in philosophy". Keeling reports that Hicks believed that philosophy "as no other subject, could impart to.. students an influence and a training such as would render them habitually reflective about their existence and destiny". Hicks "ever saw clearly that the spiritual value of philosophical studies far outweighed their academic importance" but denied "that philosophy could legitimately serve as a substitute for religion or for religious faith". Hick's significant efforts and influence as a teacher at UCL are testified to by Keeling, de Burgh and Stebbing alike and reported on by Wolf.
Having already been secretary of the Aristotelian Society for many years, Hicks was made its president in 1913 and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1927. He retired from UCL the following year and thereafter lived entirely in Cambridge but continued his long serving work as a sub-editor of the Hibbert Journal to his sick bed and, as Stebbing reports, "was writing his famous 'Philosophical Survey' for that Journal when death came, rather suddenly at the end" on 16 January 1941.

Major Philosophical Works