C. D. Broad 1887 – 1971

Charlie Dunbar Broad was a British analytic philosopher and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for nearly fifty years. He distinguished critical philosophy, the scrutiny of the categories we already use, from speculative philosophy, the attempt to articulate a world-view on the basis of all available evidence, and produced major works in both modes. The Mind and Its Place in Nature, his Tarner Lectures, surveyed the main theories of mind and body, while Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy systematically engaged the thought of his predecessor in the Trinity chair. He was unusual among analytic philosophers in taking psychical research seriously.

Charlie Dunbar Broad was born in 1887 at Harlesden in north-west London, an only child. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, took firsts in moral sciences and natural sciences, and was elected to a fellowship in 1911 with a dissertation on perception, physics, and reality that became his first book in 1914. After lectureships at St Andrews and Bristol he succeeded McTaggart at Trinity in 1923, became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1933, and held the chair until his retirement in 1953.

His major works are Perception, Physics, and Reality (1914), Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), the two large volumes of Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (1933, 1938), the Tarner Lectures Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (1953), and the late Lectures on Psychical Research (1962). He was twice president of the Society for Psychical Research.

Broad wrote a careful, taxonomic style of philosophy that he himself called second-hand, distinguishing the main alternative views on a problem and their costs and benefits without often committing himself; the result was an unusually lucid mapping of mid-century debates on perception, the mind-body problem, the nature of time, and the philosophy of religion. He died at Cambridge in March 1971.