Эрнест Бакс: Бағдарман, журналист, философ және тарихшы

English barrister, journalist, philosopher, men's rights advocate, socialist and historian

Ernest Belfort Bax (/b//æ//k//s/; 23 July 1854 – 26 November 1926) was an English barrister, journalist, philosopher, men's rights advocate, socialist, and historian.

Ernest Belfort Bax was born on 23 July 1854, in Leamington Spa, son of Daniel Bax, a wealthy Mackintosh raincoat manufacturer and traditionalist nonconformist. Bax's elder brother, barrister Alfred Ridley Bax, was father of the composer and writer Arnold Bax and the playwright and essayist Clifford Bax. In his Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and Late Victorian (1918), he describes the narrow Evangelicanism and Sabbatarianism in which he was brought up which he describes as having left "an enduringly unpleasant reminiscence behind it". He was privately educated by tutors between the years 1864–1875, and influenced by George Lewes, William Lecky, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, which contributed to his dedication to rationalism. At the age of sixteen his interest in public affairs was awakened by the Franco German War, and by its sequel, the Commune. His political ideas during this period amounted to a commonplace radicalism combined with aspirations to economic equality. In his youth Bax had an interest in music and could play the piano, and at the age of 21 (1875) he went to Germany to study music. He visited there again in 1880 as Berlin correspondent of The Standard. It was then that he met with Eduard von Hartmann and came into contact with German philosophy in general. After studying for a period, his interest in Mill, Spencer and Bain yielded to the German greats Kant and Hegel, and his philosophical interests remained with him for life.

In 1880 at the age of 26, Bax began studying philosophy in Germany, beginning with Kant and Hegel. In 1883 he produced an English translation of Kant's Prolegomena, and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and in 1884 he wrote his Handbook to the History of Philosophy, which was published in 1885 for Bohn's Philosophical Library. Later philosophical works by Bax include The Problem of Reality (1892), The Roots of Reality: Being Suggestions for a Philosophical Reconstruction (1907), Problems of Men, Mind and Morals (1912), and The Real, The Rational, and The Alogical (1920).

As well as his contributions to philosophy, men's rights, and socialism, Bax published several in depth historical studies of individuals, and cultures. He records in his Reminiscences that he always felt, from childhood on, the need of an intelligible doctrine of history. Among his historical works are: Jean Paul Marat: The People's Friend (1879), German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages (1894), The Social Side of the Reformation in Germany (1894), The Peasants' War in Germany (1899), The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists (1903), The Last Episode of the French Revolution (1911), and German Culture Past and Present (1913).