George Henry Radcliffe Parkinson (also known as Harry Parkinson; 2 November 1923 – 20 March 2015) was a British

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

and historian of philosophy.

Biography

Parkinson was born in 1923 in

Tientsin Tianjin (; ; Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Tientsin (), is a municipality and a coastal metropolis in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the nine national central cities in Mainland China, with a total popul ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, to British parents. He was educated at

Bradford Grammar School Bradford Grammar School (BGS) is a co-educational independent day school located in Frizinghall, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Entrance is by examination, except for the sixth form, where admission is based on GCSE results. The school gi ...

and

Wadham College Wadham College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It is located in the centre of Oxford, at the intersection of Broad Street and Parks Road. Wadham College was founded in 1610 by Dorothy W ...

, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1949, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1952. His doctoral thesis concerned Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza. Later work focussed on Gottfried W. (von) Leibniz. In 1950 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at the

University of Reading The University of Reading is a public university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 192 ...

, under then Head of Department Professor H A Hodges, and he remained in the department until he retired. He was made a Professor there in 1974, served as Head of Department from 1983 to 1989, and was made an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy upon his retirement. Best known for his work on the

history of philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, perhaps particularly for his work on Leibniz, Parkinson was closely associated with the journal '' Studia Leibnitiana'' from its inception in 1969, and became one of its editors in 1988.

Works

*Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1954) *Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 1965) *Leibniz on Human Freedom (Steiner, 1970) *Georg Lukacs: The Man, his Work, and his Ideas (Routledge, 1977) *The Theory of Meaning (Oxford University Press, 1968), *Marx and Marxisms (Cambridge University Press, 1982) *An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Routledge, 1988) (This is the British edition of The Handbook of Western Philosophy) *G.W.von Leibniz's Logical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1966) *G.W.von Leibniz's Philosophical Writings (J.M.Dent & Sons, 1973) *Why the Humanities?: Essays on Some Aspects of University Education (University of Reading, 1987) *The Handbook of Western Philosophy (Macmillan, 1988) *G. W. von Leibniz's De Summa Rerum: Metaphysical Papers, 1675–1676 (Yale University Press, 1992) *B. Spinoza's Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2000)

References

20th-century English historians Historians of philosophy 1923 births 2015 deaths British expatriates in China Philosophy journal editors {{philosopher-stub