Brand Blanshard 1892 – 1987
Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher of an Anglo-American rationalist temper, a long-serving professor at Yale, and one of the principal twentieth-century defenders of the coherence theory of truth and of the rationality of the universe. His two-volume Nature of Thought is a sustained argument for absolute idealism in an analytic style, while Reason and Analysis, his Carus Lectures, defended speculative philosophy against the linguistic and positivist turn of his contemporaries. His clear and elegant prose made him one of the most accessible American philosophers of his generation.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Brand Blanshard:
“All thought aims at coherence.”
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Attributed to Brand Blanshard:
“Reason is the supreme guide of life.”
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Attributed to Brand Blanshard:
“Truth is the grasp of the necessary connections of things.”
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Attributed to Brand Blanshard:
“A philosophy that abandons reason abandons philosophy.”
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Attributed to Brand Blanshard:
“Clear writing is a moral as well as an intellectual virtue.”