Brand Blanshard

Percy Brand Blanshard (/ˈblænʃərd/ BLAN-shərd; August 27, 1892 – November 19, 1987) was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of rationalism and idealism.

His parents were Francis, a Congregational minister, and Emily Coulter Blanshard, Canadians who met in high school in Weston, Ontario.

Mrs. Orminda Blanshard raised her grandsons on an annual pension of $250 from the Methodist church while the boys washed dishes at a restaurant.

Realizing their need for good education, the family relocated to Detroit in 1908 so the boys could graduate from the well known Central High School.

Once demobilized, he returned to Oxford to complete his BA (Hons) and then earned his doctorate at Harvard under Clarence Irving Lewis.

He departed from absolute idealism in many respects, so much so that he explicitly disavowed being an idealist in an essay in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (in his reply to Charles Hartshorne).

Strongly critical of positivism, logical atomism, pragmatism, and most varieties of empiricism, he held that the universe consists of an Absolute in the form of a single all-encompassing intelligible system in which each element has a necessary place.

On Blanshard's view, the Absolute is thus not merely consistent (i.e., noncontradictory) but positively coherent, shot through with relations of necessity and indeed operating purely deterministically.

In his early work The Nature of Thought, he defended a coherence theory of truth (though this is not the main thrust of that book, which, as the title makes explicit, is an essay in philosophical psychology).

He maintained, with longtime friend and philosophical colleague A.C. Ewing, that the doctrine would have caught on far better had it been more accurately described in terms of "relevance" rather than of "internality".

Beginning during his time at Swarthmore, he maintained a lifelong connection with the Religious Society of Friends despite personal disagreements with some of Quakerism's generally accepted tenets (notably its pacifism).

These two philosophers, he held, had rescued Jean-Jacques Rousseau's confused doctrine of the general will and placed it on a rationally-defensible footing.

Our "real will" (in Bosanquet's terms) or "rational will" (in Blanshard's) is simply that which we would want, all things considered, if our reflections upon what we presently desire were pursued to their ideal limit.

Blanshard argued that there is excellent reason to regard this "ideal" will as in fact real, and contended that it provided the foundation for a rational political theory.

The state is justified if, and precisely insofar as, it helps individual human beings to pursue and achieve the common end which is the object of their rational will.

However, his incisive critiques of Wittgenstein, Russell, and Moore, though almost superhumanly fair, placed him very much at odds with the main currents of Anglo-American philosophy.

Finally, his most ambitious book, "The Nature of Thought", reached publication immediately before the outbreak of war, which severely limited the reception it received.

The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (Open Court, 1980), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, is volume XV in the Library of Living Philosophers series.

[8] If there is anything in my philosophy that I should hope might last, it is the quite unoriginal but none the less important thesis that the rational life is at once the worthiest of lives and the most valuable.Many philosophers of the present day are convinced that every existing thing and event is logically unconnected with any other and could disappear from the world without necessarily affecting anything else.

This has been part of the thought of all the great rationalists from Plato through Aquinas and Spinoza to Hegel and McTaggart.What he loved above all—rationality—and what he hated above all—cruelty—were surely the right things, whether he found them in the right places or not.