Bosanquet was educated and taught at Oxford, left in order to involve himself in charity work in London, and finally held the chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews, Scotland. He held a view of the individual as a social entity whose realization involved absorption into the social and cultural activities of others. The priority of social wholes, and their necessity to the full existence of a single individual, is a reversal of classical liberal priorities, described by Bosanquet as based on the ‘pathos and bathos of sentimentalism’. His works include Knowledge and Reality (1885), Logic (1888), History of Aesthetics (1892), numerous translations from German, and works on social and ethical issues.