Harold Arthur Prichard

Harold Arthur Prichard (1871-1947), often H. A. Pritchard, was an English philosopher. He was born in London in 1871, the eldest child of Walter Stennett Prichard (a solicitor) and his wife Lucy. Harold Prichard was a scholar of Clifton College from where he won a scholarship to New College, Oxford to study mathematics. But after taking First Class honours in mathematical moderations (preliminary examinations) in 1891, he studied Greats (ancient history and philosophy) taking First Class Honours in 1894. He also played tennis for Oxford against Cambridge. On leaving Oxford he spent a brief period working for a firm of solicitors in London, before returning to Oxford where he spent the rest of his life, first as Fellow of Hertford College (1895–8) and then of Trinity College (1898–1924). He took early retirement from Trinity in 1924 on grounds of temporary ill-health, but recovered and was elected White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1928 and became a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He retired in 1937.

Prichard gave an influential defense of ethical intuitionism in his "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912), wherein he contended that moral philosophy rested chiefly on the desire to provide arguments, starting from non-normative premises, for the principles of obligation that we pre-philosophically accept, such as the principle that one ought to keep one's promises or that one ought not steal. This is a mistake, he argued, both because it is impossible to derive any statement about what one ought to do from statements not concerning obligation (even statements about what is good), and because there is no need to do so since common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident.

Writings

• Kant's Theory of Knowledge, (1909)
• "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 21 (1912): 21-37. Reprinted in Moral Obligation.
• Moral Obligation (London, 1949; 1968)
• Knowledge and Perception, Essays and Lectures (London, 1950)

References

• Jim McAdam, "Introduction", Moral Writings by H.A. Prichard, (Volume 3 of British moral philosophers), Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0199250197, pp.xiv-xv

• William J. O'Brien "H.A. Prichard's Moral Epistemology" Doctoral Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1988.

External links

• Reflections on Harold Prichard, paper about Prichard's theory of ethics.