Borden Parker Bowne 1847 – 1910
Borden Parker Bowne was an American philosopher and Methodist theologian and the founder of Boston Personalism, the most distinctively American school of idealist personalist philosophy. Long-time professor and dean of the graduate school at Boston University, he produced a series of systematic works including Metaphysics, Theism, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, and Personalism, in which the personal, conceived as the unitary subject of thought, choice, and purpose, is taken as the key category of metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. His teaching trained the next generations of Boston Personalists, including Edgar S. Brightman.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Borden Parker Bowne:
“Personality is the key to reality.”
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Attributed to Borden Parker Bowne:
“All that is not personal is for the sake of the personal.”
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Attributed to Borden Parker Bowne:
“Naturalism without personality is metaphysical evasion.”
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Attributed to Borden Parker Bowne:
“God is the supreme person, in whose life all persons participate.”
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Attributed to Borden Parker Bowne:
“Mechanical explanation reaches only the surface of things.”