Herbert Charles Sanborn (February 18, 1873 – July 6, 1967) was an American philosopher, academic and one-time political candidate.
[2] Sanborn graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy from Boston University in 1896, where one of his professors was Borden Parker Bowne.
[3] During that time, he wrote a book about Viktor Nessler's 1884 opera Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, which was reviewed in a German journal.
[3] Sanborn returned to Germany for graduate studies in 1906, and he received a PhD magna cum laude from the University of Munich in 1908.
[6][7] According to Davidson, Sanborn would pepper his lectures with "quotations from the original Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, French, or Italian, which of course he would not insult us by translating.
"[6] Davidson complained that after taking Sanborn's classes, he "did not have the least idea about schools of philosophy or such philosophical terms as epistemology and ontology", nor did he know anything about Plato.
[6] Moreover, critic Thomas A. Underwood suggests that Sanborn "fell back on a highly abstract, theoretical vocabulary in his lectures.
[14] A foilist, Sanborn competed individually, for example taking part in a national fencing competition in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1937.
[12] Sanborn regularly disagreed with James Hampton Kirkland, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, who had also studied in Germany.
[16] He was also an early member of its sponsor, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, a promoter of racial segregation.
[21] After World War II, he campaigned for the release of Karl Dönitz, Adolf Hitler's successor as the last leader of Nazi Germany.