24 Facts About Brand Blanshard

Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of rationalism and idealism.

Brand Blanshard was born August 27,1892, in Fredericksburg, Ohio.

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

The freethinker and sometime The Nation editor Paul Beecher Blanshard was his fraternal twin.

In 1902, Francis Brand Blanshard bade his mother and sons goodbye.

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

Soon both were at the top of their class, joined the debating team, and Brand Blanshard was made class Poet.

In 1910 the Brand Blanshard brothers entered the University of Michigan, whose annual tuition was only $30 for state residents.

Brand Blanshard spent the remainder of his career at Yale University until his retirement in 1961.

Brand Blanshard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946 and the American Philosophical Society in 1948.

In 1918, Brand Blanshard married Frances Bradshaw, who would become dean of women at Swarthmore.

Brand Blanshard completed her book Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore, publishing it in 1970.

Brand Blanshard died in 1987 at the age of 95, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Brand Blanshard was a rationalist who espoused and defended a strong conception of reason during a century when reason came under attack in philosophy and psychology alike.

Brand Blanshard 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.

Brand Blanshard sharply distinguished epistemological idealism from ontological idealism.

Brand Blanshard regarded his metaphysical monism as essentially a form of Spinozism.

Brand Blanshard backed away from his early claim that the ultimate aim of thought was identification with its object.

Brand Blanshard's fullest published reply appears in his book Reason and Analysis.

Brand Blanshard regarded the first of these factors as by far the more important and held that the major intrinsic goods of human experience answer to the basic drives of human nature; he maintained that these two factors together provide not merely a criterion for but the actual meaning of intrinsic goodness.

The little that Brand Blanshard wrote on political theory owed much to Green and Bosanquet.

Brand 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.

Brand Blanshard did not develop this doctrine to the point of advocating any specific form of political organization or social structure, but in his Schilpp autobiography, he described an early sympathy for socialism and to having voted the "straight Democratic ticket" over the previous 40-odd years.

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