Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
Born	(1873-10-10)October 10, 1873 Berlin,German Empire
Died	December 30, 1962(1962-12-30) (aged 89) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Education
Education	UC Berkeley (BA) Harvard University (MA)
Academic advisors	William James Josiah Royce
Philosophical work
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	New realism
Notable ideas	History of ideas

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (October 10, 1873 – December 30, 1962) was an Americanphilosopher andintellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as thehistory of ideas with his bookThe Great Chain of Being (1936), on thetopic of that name, which has been described as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'.^[1] He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1932.^[2] In 1940, he founded theJournal of the History of Ideas.

Lovejoy was born inBerlin,Germany, while his father was doing medical research there. Eighteen months later, his mother, a daughter ofJohann Gerhard Oncken, committed suicide, whereupon his father gave up medicine and became a clergyman. Lovejoy studiedphilosophy, first at theUniversity of California atBerkeley, then atHarvard^[3] underWilliam James andJosiah Royce.^[4] He did not earn a Ph.D.^[5] In 1901, he resigned from his first job, atStanford University, to protest the dismissal of a colleague who had offended a trustee. The President of Harvard then vetoed hiring Lovejoy on the grounds that he was a known troublemaker. Over the subsequent decade, he taught atWashington University in St. Louis,Columbia University, and theUniversity of Missouri.

As a professor of philosophy atJohns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938, Lovejoy founded and long presided over that university's History of Ideas Club, where many prominent and budding intellectual and social historians, as well asliterary critics, gathered. In 1940 he co-founded theJournal of the History of Ideas withPhilip P. Wiener.^[6] Lovejoy insisted that the history of ideas should focus on "unit ideas", single concepts (namely simple concepts sharing an abstract name with other concepts that were to be conceptually distinguished).

Lovejoy was active in the public arena. He helped found theAmerican Association of University Professors and theMaryland chapter of theAmerican Civil Liberties Union. However, he qualified his belief incivil liberties to exclude what he considered threats to a free system. Thus, at the height of theMcCarthy era (in the February 14, 1952, edition of theJournal of Philosophy) Lovejoy stated that, since it was a "matter of empirical fact" that membership in theCommunist Party contributed "to the triumph of a world-wide organization" which was opposed to "freedom of inquiry, of opinion and of teaching", membership in the party constituted grounds for dismissal from academic positions. He also published numerous opinion pieces in the Baltimore press. He died inBaltimore on December 30, 1962.

In the domain ofepistemology, Lovejoy is remembered for an influential critique of the pragmatic movement, especially in the essay "The Thirteen Pragmatisms", written in 1908.^[7] Abstract nouns like 'pragmatism' 'idealism', 'rationalism' and the like were, in Lovejoy's view, constituted by distinct, analytically separate ideas, which the historian of the genealogy of ideas had to thresh out, and show how the basic unit ideas combine and recombine with each other over time.^[8]

Lovejoy was an opponent ofAlbert Einstein'stheory of relativity.^[9] In 1930, he published a paper criticizing Einstein's relativistic concept ofsimultaneity as arbitrary.^[10][11]

William F. Bynum, looking back at Lovejoy'sGreat Chain of Being after 40 years, describes it as "a familiar feature of the intellectual landscape", indicating its great influence and "brisk" ongoing sales. Bynum argues that much more research is needed into how the concept of the great chain of being was replaced, but he agrees that Lovejoy was right that the crucial period was the end of the 18th century when "theEnlightenment's chain of being was dismantled".^[12]

• Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, (1935). (withGeorge Boas).Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997 edition:ISBN 0-8018-5611-6
• The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936).Harvard University Press. Reprinted by Harper & Row,ISBN 0-674-36150-4, 2005 paperback:ISBN 0-674-36153-9.
• Essays in the History of Ideas (1948).Johns Hopkins University Press.
• The Revolt Against Dualism (1960).Open Court Publishing Company.ISBN 0-87548-107-8
• The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (1961).Johns Hopkins University Press.ISBN 0-8018-0393-4
• Reflections on Human Nature (1961).Johns Hopkins University Press.ISBN 0-8018-0395-0
• The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (1963).Johns Hopkins University Press.ISBN 0-8018-0396-9

• "The Entangling Alliance of Religion and History",The Hibbert Journal, Vol. V, October 1906/ July 1907.
• "The Desires of the Self-Conscious",The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 4, No. 2, Jan. 17, 1907.
• "The Place of Linnaeus in the History of Science",The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXI, 1907.
• "The Origins of Ethical Inwardness in Jewish Thought",The American Journal of Theology, Vol. XI, 1907.
• "Kant and the English Platonists". InEssays, Philosophical and Psychological, Longmans, Green & Co., 1908.
• "Pragmatism and Theology",The American Journal of Theology, Vol. XII, 1908.
• "The Theory of a Pre-Christian Cult of Jesus",The Monist, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, October 1908.
• "The Thirteen Pragmatisms",The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. V, January/December, 1908.
• "The Argument for Organic Evolution Before the 'Origin of Species'",Part II,Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXV, July/December, 1909.
• "Schopenhauer as an Evolutionist",The Monist, Vol. XXI, 1911.
• "Kant and Evolution",Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXVII, 1910;Part II,Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXVIII, 1911.
• "The Problem of Time in Recent French Philosophy",Part II,Part III,The Philosophical Review, Vol. XXI, 1912.
• "Relativity, Reality, and Contradiction",The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1914.
• "Pragmatism Versus the Pragmatist." In:Essays in Critical Realism. London: Macmillan & Co., 1920.
• "Professional Ethics and Social Progress",The North American Review, March 1924.
• "The Dialectical Argument Against Absolute Simultaneity",The Journal of Philosophy, 1930.
• "Plans for the Future",Free World, November 1943.

• "Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr Von",A Cyclopedia of Education, ed. by Paul Monroe,The Macmillan Company, 1911.
• "The Unity of Science",The University of Missouri Bulletin: Science Series, Vol. I, N°. 1, January 1912.
• Bergson & Romantic Evolutionism; Two Lectures Delivered Before the Union, September 5 & 12, 1913,University of California Press, 1914.

• Campbell, James, "Arthur Lovejoy and the Progress of Philosophy,", in:Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 39, No. 4, Fall, 2003.
• Diggins, John P., "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual History,", in:Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 67, Number 1, January 2006.
• Duffin, Kathleen E. "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Emergence of Novelty," in:Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 41, No. 2, Apr./Jun., 1980.
• Feuer, Lewis S., "The Philosophical Method of Arthur O. Lovejoy: Critical Realism and Psychoanalytical Realism," in:Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 4, Jun., 1963.
• Feuer, Lewis S. "Arthur O. Lovejoy," in:The American Scholar, Vol. 46, No. 3, Summer 1977.
• Mandelbaum, Maurice. "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Theory of Historiography," in:Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 4, Oct., 1948.
• Moran, Seán Farrell, "A.O. Lovejoy", in: Kelly Boyd, ed.,The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Routledge, 1999.
• Randall Jr., John Herman, "Arthur O. Lovejoy and the History of Ideas," in:Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 4, Jun., 1963.
• Wilson, Daniel J.,Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility, University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

EnglishWikisource has original works by or about:

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

• Works by Arthur O. Lovejoy atJSTOR.
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas article on the Great Chain of Being.
• Lovejoy Papers at Johns Hopkins University. Includes a short biography.
• Dale Keiger,Tussling with the Idea Man
• "The Chinese Origin of Romanticism", in:Essays in the History of Ideas, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948.
• Works by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy atLibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

• 1873 births
• 1962 deaths
• American historians
• American literary critics
• American expatriates in the German Empire
• People from Berlin
• Harvard University alumni
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• People from the Province of Brandenburg
• Philosophers of time
• University of Missouri faculty
• Washington University in St. Louis faculty
• American Civil Liberties Union people
• Presidents of the American Association of University Professors
• Relativity critics
• American historians of philosophy
• Pragmatists
• Members of the American Philosophical Society

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• Articles with LibriVox links