Edward Caird’s Critique of Empirical Consciousness AAR EIR, May 1-2, 2015; McGill University, Montreal, Quebec by Richard Greydanus The paper that I am giving today is a summary of one of the main lines of argument in my thesis on the work of Edward Caird. An idealist by philosophical persuasion, Caird was one-time the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, and later Master of Baliol College, Oxford. My thesis work looks specifically at the connections between Caird’s earlier works of philosophical criticism on Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel and his two later series Gifford Lectures on The Evolution of Religion and The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers. The line of argument I will pursue looks at the development of Caird’s critique of ‘empiricism’ in the study of human history—and more specifically in the study of religion. 1 I will argue that Caird employs a Hegelian idea of self-consciousness to draw attention to the problem that the embodiment of self-consciousness poses for the study of religion. The problem raises questions about what it is exactly people look for when they go to the material record of the human past. 2 Do they look for beings who are fundamentally like their own embodied selves? Or do they look for sets of empirical phenomena that are better explained by analogy to natural processes? Caird’s own use of the term ‘evolution’ serves as a case 1 See Edward Caird, ‘The Problem of Philosophy,’ 42. 2 Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, Vol. I ( Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1893), 20. 1