Henry Sidgwick (31 May 1838 – 28 August 1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist, best known within philosophy for his treatise The Methods of Ethics (1874), and on The Vault as a co-founder and the first president of the Society for Psychical Research.
Academic career
Sidgwick was educated at Rugby School before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow in 1859. He became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1883, a position he held until his death. Alongside Millicent Garrett Fawcett, he co-founded Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875 — the university's second college to admit women — and his wife, Eleanor Mildred Balfour, later served as its principal.
Psychical research
Sidgwick had a lifelong interest in claims of psychic phenomena, joining Cambridge's informal "Ghost Society" as an undergraduate and continuing years of informal investigation before the Society for Psychical Research was formally established. His involvement was driven substantially by a search for empirical evidence bearing on the survival of consciousness after death, a question he connected to his broader philosophical concerns about whether moral behaviour could be shown to be rewarded beyond a person's lifetime.
When the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, both Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney made their own involvement conditional on Sidgwick accepting the presidency, given his reputation for exacting, sceptical fair-mindedness. He served as the Society's first president from 1882 to 1885, and again from 1888 to 1893. Sidgwick became convinced that telepathy had some genuine basis, but remained cautious about treating mediumistic phenomena as proof of survival after death, and later in life reflected that his psychical research had not produced the conclusive evidence he had originally hoped for.
Death and legacy
Sidgwick died on 28 August 1900. He is remembered in philosophy chiefly for his contributions to utilitarian ethics, and in psychical research as the figure whose reputation for rigour and restraint gave the newly formed Society for Psychical Research much of its early scientific credibility.