Бранд Бланшард: Американ философының өмірі мен философиясы

American philosopher (1892–1987)

After a short teaching stint at Michigan, he taught at Swarthmore College from 1925 to 1944. He spent the remainder of his career at Yale University until his retirement in 1961. At Yale, he served as chairman of the Department of Philosophy for many years. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1946 and the American Philosophical Society in 1948. In 1952, he delivered the Gifford Lectures in Scotland. In 1955 he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Merton College.

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. He was also generally regarded as one of the last absolute idealists because he was strongly influenced by British idealism (especially F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet). However, this influence was felt primarily in his views concerning logic, values, and epistemology. He 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 (in his reply to Charles Hartshorne). Blanshard sharply distinguished epistemological idealism (the position that all objects of direct experience exist only in consciousness) from ontological idealism (the position that the world in itself is mental, or made of mind stuff). While he accepted epistemological idealism, he wasn't prepared to take the extra step to ontological idealism, unlike Berkeley, Hegel, Royce, or Bosanquet. Rather, he thought it all but certain that the material world exists independently of mind and rejected the basic dictum of Berkeleian ontological idealism, that esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). Strongly critical of positivism, logical atomism, pragmatism, and most varieties of empiricism, he held that the universe consists of an Absolute in the form of a single all encompassing intelligible system in which each element has a necessary place. Moreover, this Absolute—the universe as a whole—he held to be the only true "particular", all elements within it being ultimately resoluble into specific "universals" (properties, relations, or combinations thereof that might be given identically in more than one context). He regarded his metaphysical monism as essentially a form of Spinozism. Also strongly critical of reductionist accounts of mind (e. g., behaviorism), he maintained to the contrary that mind is the reality of which we are in fact most certain. Thought, he held, is that activity of mind which aims at truth, and the ultimate object of thought is full understanding of the Absolute. Such understanding comes about, in his view, through a grasp of necessity: to understand (or explain) something is to see it as necessitated within a system of which it is a part. On Blanshard's view, the Absolute is thus not merely consistent (i. e., noncontradictory) but positively coherent, shot through with relations of necessity and indeed operating purely deterministically. (Blanshard held the law of causality, properly understood, to be a logical law and believed that effects logically determine their causes as well as vice versa.) Strictly speaking, he admitted, we cannot prove that there are no atomic facts, bare conjunctions, or sheer surds in nature, but we can take it as our working hypothesis that relations of necessity are always to be found; until and unless this hypothesis meets with absolute defeat, we are justified in adopting it at least provisionally. In his early work The Nature of Thought, he defended a coherence theory of truth (though this is not the main thrust of that book, which, as the title makes explicit, is an essay in philosophical psychology). In his later years, however, he came to think that the relation between thought and object was sui generis and might be described, about equally inadequately, as either "correspondence" or "coherence"; at any rate, he admitted, the "coherence" between thought and its ideal object differs from the coherence that may obtain among thoughts. He also backed away from his early (more or less Bradleian) claim that the ultimate aim of thought was identification with its object. He defended a strong doctrine of internal relations. He maintained, with longtime friend and philosophical colleague A. C. Ewing, that the doctrine would have caught on far better had it been more accurately described in terms of "relevance" rather than of "internality". His doctrine on this point was that no relation is entirely irrelevant to the natures of the terms it relates, such relevance (and therefore "internality") being a matter of degree. One of Blanshard's most important exchanges on this topic was with philosopher Ernest Nagel, who attacked the doctrine of internal relations — indeed, Blanshard's entire conception of reason — in his essay "Sovereign Reason". Blanshard's fullest published reply appears in his book Reason and Analysis. Sympathetic to theism but skeptical of traditional religious and theological dogma, he did not regard his Absolute as having the characteristics of a personal God but nevertheless maintained that it was a proper subject of (rational) religious inquiry and even devotion. Defining "religion" as the dedication of one's whole person to whatever one regards as true and important, he took as his own religion the service of reason in a very full and all encompassing metaphysical sense, defending what he called the "rational temper" as a human ideal (though one exceedingly difficult to achieve in practice). His admiration for this temper extended his philosophical loyalties across "party lines", especially to the one philosopher he regarded as exemplifying that temper to the greatest degree: Henry Sidgwick. (He also spoke highly of Bertrand Russell.) Theologically, Blanshard was raised Methodist but tended toward theological liberalism from an early age, a tendency that became more pronounced as he grew older. Beginning during his time at Swarthmore, he maintained a lifelong connection with the Religious Society of Friends despite personal disagreements with some of Quakerism's generally accepted tenets (notably its pacifism). In ethics, he was broadly utilitarian; however, he preferred the term "teleological" since the term "utilitarian" suggested that all goods were instrumental and he believed (with, e. g., H. W. B. Joseph and W. D. Ross) that some experiences were intrinsically good. He also denied that pleasure is the sole good, maintaining instead (with T. H. Green) that experiences are good as wholes and that pleasure is not, strictly speaking, a separable element within such wholes. Disagreeing with G. E. Moore that the "naturalistic fallacy" is really a fallacy, he gave an entirely naturalistic analysis of goodness, holding that an experience is intrinsically good to the degree that it (a) fulfills an impulse or drive and (b) generates a feeling tone of satisfaction attendant upon such fulfillment. He 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. (He defined all other ethical terms, including "right", in terms of intrinsic goodness, a right act, for example, being that act which tends to produce the greatest amount of intrinsic goodness under the relevant circumstances.) The little that Blanshard wrote on political theory (mainly in Reason and Goodness) owed much to Green and Bosanquet. These two philosophers, he held, had rescued Jean Jacques Rousseau's confused doctrine of the general will and placed it on a rationally defensible footing. Our "real will" (in Bosanquet's terms) or "rational will" (in Blanshard's) is simply that which we would want, all things considered, if our reflections upon what we presently desire were pursued to their ideal limit. 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. The state is justified if, and precisely insofar as, it helps individual human beings to pursue and achieve the common end which is the object of their rational will. He 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. A firm believer in clarity of exposition, and himself one of the ablest writers of philosophical prose in the English language, he wrote a short book "On Philosophical Style" in defense of the view that philosophical profundity need not (and should not) be couched in obscurity and obfuscation. Both this book and his Reason and Analysis are probably best understood as complementary facets of his extensive work on metaphilosophy (never labeled as such). While Blanshard was a great admirer of the clarity and rigor of British analytical philosophy, which he saw as its best characteristic, he was appalled by what he regarded as the greatly shrunken scope of philosophy as conceived by both logical positivism and later 'ordinary language' philosophy. His extraordinarily thorough and telling critique of these approaches in "Reason and Analysis" has profoundly therapeutic implications for how philosophy might be done, and the topics, including metaphysics, with which it may properly be concerned. However, his incisive critiques of Wittgenstein, Russell, and Moore, though almost superhumanly fair, placed him very much at odds with the main currents of Anglo American philosophy. At the same time he was unsympathetic to what he saw as the anti rationalism, and tendency to obscurantism, of Existentialism, which placed him at odds with some tendencies in Continental philosophy. Finally, his most ambitious book, "The Nature of Thought", reached publication immediately before the outbreak of war, which severely limited the reception it received. In consequence of this, his oeuvre hasn't achieved the recognition and influence it otherwise might have.

The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (Open Court, 1980), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, is volume XV in the Library of Living Philosophers series. This capstone work contains Blanshard's 183 page autobiography, detailed responses by Blanshard to his critics, and a complete bibliography.

2 volumes. 451 pages. The Paul Carus lectures, 12th series. 505 pages. 407 pages. 620 pages. His last work. Contains biographical accounts of four exemplars of the rational temper: Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, and Henry Sidgwick. 308 pages. .