Hamilton William (1788–1856), Scottish philosopher and logician. Born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford, he was for most of his life professor at the University of Edinburgh (1821–56). Though hardly an orthodox or uncritical follower of Reid and Stewart, he became one of the most important members of the school of Scottish common sense philosophy. His ‘philosophy of the conditioned’ has a somewhat Kantian flavor. Like Kant, he held that we can have knowledge only of ‘the relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself it is our highest wisdom to recognize as beyond the reach of philosophy.’ Unlike Kant, however, he argued for the position of a ‘natural realism’ in the Reidian tradition. The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has seemed to many – including J. S. Mill – contradictory to his realism. For Hamilton, the two are held together by a kind of intuitionism that emphasizes certain facts of consciousness that are both primitive and incomprehensible. They are, though constitutive of knowledge, ‘less forms of cognitions than of beliefs.’ In logic he argued for a doctrine involving quantification of predicates and the view that propositions can be reduced to equations. See also SCOTTISH COM- MON SENSE PHILOSOPH. M.K.