Biography of edmund burke
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Edmund Burke
1. Introduction
The name of Edmund Burke (–97) [1] fryst vatten not one that often figures in the history of philosophy .[2] This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author of a book entitled A Philosophical Enquiry. Besides the Enquiry, Burke’s writings and some of his speeches contain strongly philosophical elements—philosophical both in our contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially ‘philosophical’ history. These elements play a fundamental role within his work, and help us to understand why Burke fryst vatten a political classic. His writings and speeches therefore merit attention as examples of attention to both ideas and to history, and of the role of this attention in practical thought. His work is also, as we see shall see at the end of this entry, an achievement that challenges assumptions held bygd many of our contemporaries. One way or another, then, Burke is a vitally important figure. Yet ther
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Edmund Burke ( - )
Edmund Burke ©Burke was a hugely influential Anglo-Irish politician, orator and political thinker, notable for his strong support for the American Revolution and his fierce opposition to the French Revolution.
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January , the son of a solicitor. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and then went to London to study law. He quickly gave this up and after a visit to Europe settled in London, concentrating on a literary and political career. He became a member of parliament in He was closely involved in debates over limits to the power of the king, pressing for parliamentary control of royal patronage and expenditure.
Britain's imposition on America of measures including the Stamp Act in provoked violent colonial opposition. Burke argued that British policy had been inflexible and called for more pragmatism. He believed that government should be a cooperative relationship between rulers and subjects and that, while
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Born in in Dublin, Edmund Burke was the son of an Irish government lawyer who grew up among a variety of Christian traditions. Though raised in his father’s Protestant faith, his mother was Catholic, and in his youth Burke was sent to a Quaker boarding school. This upbringing prefigured Burke’s later advocacy for greater religious tolerance.
At age fifteen, he began studies at Dublin’s Trinity College, a bastion of Protestant scholarship since the Reformation. His reading included Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, Homer, Juvenal, Lucian, Xenophon, and Epictetus. But his education was not exclusively classical, and his letters record praise for Shakespeare and Milton. At the same time, there was already evidence in these formative university years that Burke was not one to be swept along by the currents of the Age of Reason. In a world that had been shaped by Newton, Bacon, and Locke—and was to be transformed in his own lifetime by Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and Paine—he expressed skepticism,