Samuel Alexander OM FBA (6 January 1859 – 13 September 1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher.

[3] He was born into a Jewish family at 436 George Street, Sydney, Australia, the third son of Samuel Alexander, a prosperous saddler, and Eliza née Sloman.

Eliza moved the family to St Kilda, Victoria in 1863 or 1864, and Alexander was tutored, and placed at a private school.

He travelled on the continent of Europe, and in the winter of 1890–91 was in Germany working on experimental psychology at the laboratory of Hugo Münsterberg at Freiburg.

[9] Robert Mackintosh (1858–1933) owed his appointment as lecturer in 1904 to the new Manchester theological faculty in 1904 to Alexander, he believed.

[10] Alexander introduced experimental psychology at Manchester in 1907, in unorthodox fashion, with the appointment of Tom Pear (1886–1972), later a professor.

Pear was recruited while still an undergraduate, but was backed by Charles Sherrington, who had brought William George Smith as a lecturer to the University of Liverpool in 1905.

He was unmarried and his ashes lie in Manchester Southern cemetery (British Jewish Reform Congregation section).

[5] Alexander contributed articles on philosophical subjects to Mind, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and the International Journal of Ethics.

He was influenced by T. H. Green, in whose memory the prize had been set up, but diverged from his views in pursuing evolutionary ethics.

[2] John Laird called it "the boldest adventure in detailed speculative metaphysics attempted in so grand a manner by any English writer between 1655 and 1920".

Compared to his systematic work, it was rather closer to the mainstream of British thought, and was praised highly by R. G.

God is the whole universe engaged in process towards the emergence of this new quality, and religion is the sentiment in us that we are drawn towards him, and caught in the movement of the world to a higher level of existence.His idea was to start with space and time, each of which he regarded as inconceivable without the other, in fact mutually equivalent.

His thinking, as he said, originated in Instinct and Experience (1912) by C. Lloyd Morgan; who went on in 1922 to give an exposition of emergent properties.

[24] A change in Alexander's home life occurred in 1902 when the whole of his family—his mother, an aunt, two elder brothers and his sister—came from Australia to live with him.

[6] Alexander was an "unofficial godfather" to writer Naomi Mitchison née Haldane, born in 1897.

Mitchison devoted a chapter in her autobiographical work You May Well Ask to Alexander, recounting affectionate anecdotes and quoting extensively from his letters.