John Grote (5 May 1813, Beckenham – 21 August 1866, Trumpington, Cambridgeshire) was an English moral philosopher and Anglican clergyman.
[1] From 1847 until his death, he was vicar of Trumpington, where he was a neighbour of his close friend Robert Leslie Ellis, the paralysed mathematician and Bacon scholar.
In 1855, Grote succeeded William Whewell as Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University.
Grote's literary executor and editor, Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, also put together a Treatise on Moral Ideals (1876) and volume II of Exploratio Philosophica (1900), and married his niece, Alexandrina.
[2] A philosophical idealist and opponent of utilitarianism (as befitted his Cambridge and Anglican clerical identity), Grote was nevertheless happy to admit the new experimental psychology of someone like John Stuart Mill's disciple Alexander Bain – as long as such 'phenomenal' and more properly 'philosophical' investigations were not conflated with each other.