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 ] in London — 1967) was a British civil servant, educator and philosopher who wrote on Hegel and Mysticism.

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 at Trinity College Dublin. Between 1910 and 1932, he served in the Ceylon Civil Service, holding several positions in the Ceylonese government including that of Mayor of Colombo. He became Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University in 1935 and was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1949 and 1950. "Mysticism and Philosophy" is considered Stace's major work. Stace was the dissertation advisor of John 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=British civil servant, educator and philosopher.
DATE OF BIRTH=November 17, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH=London
DATE OF DEATH=1967
PLACE OF DEATH=