- Walter Terence Stace
Walter Terence Stace (
November 17 ,1886 [ cite web|url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0065-972X(1967%2F1968)41%3C136%3AWTS1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 |title=Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 41, 1967 - 1968 (1967 - 1968), pp. 136-138 |accessdate=2006-11-13 ] inLondon — 1967) was a Britishcivil servant ,educator andphilosopher who wrote onHegel andMysticism .Biography
Stace was born into a military family, with his great-grandfather General William Stace having served in the
Battle of Waterloo , but chose a religious and philosophical path. He was educated atTrinity College Dublin . Between 1910 and 1932, he served in the Ceylon Civil Service, holding several positions in theCeylon ese government including that of Mayor ofColombo . He became Stuart Professor of Philosophy atPrinceton University in 1935 and was president of theAmerican Philosophical Association in 1949 and 1950. "Mysticism and Philosophy" is considered Stace's major work. Stace was the dissertation advisor ofJohn Rawls when Rawls was a graduate student at Princeton, though it is not clear that Stace had a strong influence on Rawls.Richard Marius attributed his loss of faith partly to his intellectual engagement with Stace.Theology and mystery
Professor James Ward Smith, a colleague and former student, has said that Stace's basic position was that empiricism does not require the confinement of belief to propositions that are in any strict sense demonstrable.
``The boy who had experienced religious conversion [Professor Smith wrote] was never smothered by the mature clearly-reasoning empiricist. . . . `Either God is a mystery or He is nothing at all,' Stace wrote. `To ask for a proof of the existence of God is on a par with asking for a proof of the existence of beauty. If God does not lie at the end of any telescope, neither does he lie at the end of any syllogism. . . .'" [ cite web|url=http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/stace_walter.html |title="Stace, Walter Terence. From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978). |accessdate=2008-04-26 ]
Works
* "A Critical History of Greek Philosophy"
* "The Philosophy of Hegel"
* "The Meaning of Beauty"
* "The Concept of Morals"
* "The Destiny of Western Man" [For a review see, for example " [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28194303%293%3A3%3C377%3ATDOWM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I] " by W. Cerf Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Mar., 1943), pp. 377-380.]
* "Religion and the modern mind"
* "Mysticism and Philosophy". [http://wudhi.com/mysticism/ws/index.htm Full text online]External links
* [http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/stace_walter.html Short biography]
* [http://homepages.wmich.edu/~baldner/stace_files/frame.htm]References
Persondata
NAME=Stace, Walter Terence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Britishcivil servant ,educator andphilosopher .
DATE OF BIRTH=November 17 ,1886
PLACE OF BIRTH=London
DATE OF DEATH=1967
PLACE OF DEATH=
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