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Sidgwick, Henry
An outstanding English moral philosopher of the late Victorian era, Henry Sidgwick was born on May 31, 1838, in Skipton, Yorkshire, and had a brilliant academic career at Rugby school and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in both classics and mathematics. As a young man, and member of the famous discussion society known as the Cambridge Apostles, he developed religious doubts and an interest in the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, which held that the ultimate normative standard was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He quickly became a devoted academic liberal and educational reformer, championing a Millian form of feminism and challenging the academic status quo on many fronts, from the unfair exclusion of women, to the overemphasis on ...
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