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Jacob Gould Schurman

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN (1854-1942), American educationist, was born at Freetown, Prince Edward Island, on the 22nd of May 1854, of Dutch descent, his Loyalist ancestors having left New York in 1784. While a student at Acadia College, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1875, he won the Canadian Gilchrist scholarship in the University of London, from which he received the degree of B.A. in 1877 and that of M.A. in 1878, and in1877-1880studied in Paris, Edinburgh and (as Hibbert Fellow) in Heidelberg, Berlin and Gottingen. He was professor of English literature, political economy and psychology at Acadia College in 1880-1882, of metaphysics and English literature at Dalhousie College, Halifax, N.S., in 1882-1886, and of philosophy (Sage professor) at Cornell University in 1886-1892, being Dean of the Sage School of Philosophy in 1891-1892. In 1892 he became president of Cornell University. He was chairman of the First United States Philippine Commission in 1899, and wrote (besides a part of the official report to Congress) Philippine Affairs - A Retrospect and an Outlook (1902). With J. E. Creighton and James Seth he founded in 1892 The Philosophical Review. He also wrote Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution (1881); The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1888); Belief in God (1890), and Agnosticism and Religion (1896).