Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He studied at Oxford in the late 1870s and early 1880s within the intellectual climate of
British idealism before he settled ‘up north’ as the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Manchester in 1893. From there he developed a distinctive metaphysical system that was so infuential he became a leading fgure of British philosophy in the early twentieth century. J.H. Muirhead reports that by 1924—after F.H. Bradley’s death—Alexander was the leading philosopher in Britain (Muirhead 1939, 3).