Exploratio Philosophica. Part I and II. Edited for the Syndics of the press by Joseph Bickersteth Mayor.

First complete edition (second edition of Part I and first edition of Part II). Two volumes. 8vo. xlvii, [1], 258; xiv, [2], 340 pp., engraved frontispiece portrait of the author, with tissue guard, to Vol. 2. Original red cloth, spines lettered and ruled in gilt, edges untrimmed (partial offsetting to free endpapers and ex-library labels to front pastedowns of both volumes, otherwise generally internally clean; light wear to extremities, old classmarks in white to spines, still a good set overall). Cambridge, At the University Press.

The first complete edition of the principal work by the Cambridge moral philosopher and Anglican clergyman John Grote (1813-1886), the first part was originally published during his lifetime in 1865 and is reprinted here along with the first appearance of the second part. 

Grote is broadly aligned with the British Idealists and the first part of his Exploratio Philosophica focuses extensively on critiquing the then dominate utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. The posthumously published second part, edited by his literary executor Joseph Bickerstaff Major, 'unpacks a Hegelian-style phenomenology in which the original coherence of feeling and being in immediateness, the 'given', is disrupted by knowledge, reflection, and judgement, especially the recognition of 'wants'. He coins, contrasts, and synchronizes 'knowledge of acquaintance and judgement' to explain this. The resulting 'doubleness' in which we separate wants and ideals, self and other, subject and object, mind and matter, is and ought, past and future, provides the 'resistance' that hampers philosophy and practical life and which thought and action are intended to overcome' (ODNB).

Stock Code: 246356