William Ralph Boyce Gibson
(1869-1935)
When Boyce Gibson accepted the chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy
at the University of Melbourne in 1911, he already had a considerable
achievement behind him, having lectured in English universities, written
books on ethics, logic and the philosophy of Eucken and published in
journals including the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, London,
Mind and the Revue de mtaphysique et de morale.
He espoused the tenets of Personal Idealism, a belief in the metaphysical
autonomy of personality, as opposed to both Naturalism, which considers
personality an outcome of "the mechanism of Nature" and Idealism
which considers it an "adjective" of the Absolute. In 1906
and 1909 Gibson published works on Eucken's interpretation of Personal
Idealism which held, as Gibson expressed it, that "the measure
and standard of our thought is fixed by the measure and standard of
our life".
Gibson's interest in the work of Henri Bergson and the relation of physics
and philosophy informed his presidential address to the 1931 conference
of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled
"Relativity and First Principles". He was also deeply interested
in the Phenomenological Movement and his translation of Husserl's Ideen
zu einer Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie in 1931 introduced
Husserl to Anglophone readers.
Lucy Judge Peacock (1872-1953) married Gibson in 1898. She had studied
classics and oriental languages at Girton and Sanskrit at the Sorbonne
and Jena. She collaborated with her husband on two translations of the
work of Eucken and translated another alone.
The Gibsons had five sons, four of whom graduated from the University
of Melbourne. Keith was killed in a climbing accident, Alexander (BA
1920) became the third Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Melbourne, Colin (BA 1938) became a Unitarian minister, Quentin (BA
1934) established Philosophy at the Canberra University College (later
the Australian National University) and Ralph (BA 1927) became a leading
member of the Australian Communist Party.
