Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, the American philosopher and historian of ideas, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of the Reverend W. W. Lovejoy of Boston and Sara Oncken of Hamburg. Educated at the University of California (Berkeley) and at Harvard, where he received his MA, Lovejoy began his teaching career at Stanford University (1899–1901) and then taught for seven years at Washington University in St. Louis. After short periods at Columbia University and the University of Missouri, he went to Johns Hopkins in 1910 as professor of philosophy, remaining there until his retirement in 1938. In 1927 he gave the Carus Lectures, published as The Revolt against Dualism in 1930, and the William James Lectures, published as The Great Chain of Being in 1933. Lovejoy was widely known as an epistemologist, a philosophic critic, a historian of ideas, and a man of action. He helped to organize the...