Grote, John (1813–66)

From 1855 Grote was Knightbridge Professor at Cambridge. His literary legacy was largely posthumous. Often seen as unsystematic, he was in fact a penetrating thinker who forcefully criticized utilitarianism and positivism and ably argued that ‘all that we call existence is for us a thought of ours’; his was a seminal British idealism, stressing both the gulf between philosophical inquiry and the sciences and the difficulty of distinguishing the necessary from the contingent.