John Grote, the English moral philosopher and epistemologist, was born at Beckenham in Kent. He was a younger brother of George Grote, the historian. Grote studied classics at Cambridge and became a fellow of Trinity College in 1837. He took orders in the Church of England and eventually obtained a church living at Trumpington, where he resided until his death. In 1855 he succeeded William Whewell as Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge. For a number of years an informal group, sometimes called the Grote Club, met regularly with him for philosophical discussion; Henry Sidgwick and John Venn were among its members.

Grote's writings were concerned primarily with ethics and theory of knowledge. He thought the former the more important study and intended the epistemological discussions in his Exploratio Philosophica to serve as prolegomena to his moral theory. Throughout his work he criticized the claim...