Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
From Philosopedia
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (21 April 1828 - 5 March 1893)
Taine, the French critic and historian, was the typical French rationalist of his time according to J. M. Robertson. However, he was in his latter years a reactionary on political grounds.
For 20 years, he was a professor of aesthetics and art history at the École des Beaux-Arts. His French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century (1856) sharply criticized the spiritualist and religious school.
In 1878 Taine was elected to the French Academy, much to the regret of the clergy, which had tried for years to keep him out.
But his History of English Literature (1864), Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1894, 6 volumes), and other works gave him worldwide acclaim, and he was recognized, along with Renan, as “one of the intellectual guides of the generation which formed between 1860 and 1890,” according to the Grande Encyclopédie.
Taine’s socio-historical method of analysis had considerable influence on philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and the social sciences. Boutmy, a biographer, showed that, although Taine became conservative in politics, he remained an agnostic to the end.
