George Henry Radcliffe Parkinson
George Henry Radcliffe Parkinson was a British philosopher and historian of philosophy.
Biography
Parkinson was born in 1923 in Tianjin, China, to British parents. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1949, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1952. His doctoral thesis concerned Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza. Later work focused on Gottfried W. (von) Leibniz. In 1950 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading, under then Head of Department Professor H A Hodges, and he remained in the department until he retired. He was made a Professor there in 1974, served as Head of Department from 1983 to 1989, and was made an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy upon his retirement.Best known for his work on the history of philosophy, perhaps particularly for his work on Leibniz, Parkinson was closely associated with the journal Studia Leibnitiana from its inception in 1969, and became one of its editors in 1988.
Works
- Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge
- Logic and Reality in Leibniz's Metaphysics
- Leibniz on Human Freedom
- Georg Lukacs: The Man, his Work, and his Ideas
- The Theory of Meaning,
- Marx and Marxisms
- An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
- G. W. von Leibniz's Logical Papers
- G. W. von Leibniz's Philosophical Writings
- Why the Humanities?: Essays on Some Aspects of University Education
- The Handbook of Western Philosophy
- G. W. von Leibniz's De Summa Rerum: Metaphysical Papers, 1675–1676
- B. Spinoza's Ethics