Brand Blanshard

From Philosopedia

Brand Blanshard (27 August 1902 -19 November 1987)

A professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale University when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, noted aestheticist Brand Blanshard was a Humanist Laureate in the Academy of Humanism. Also, he was Paul Blanshard's twin brother.

In 1980, he was a signer of the Secular Humanist Declaration.

For The Humanist in the 1950s, Blanshard the expert on beauty reviewed Bertrand Russell’s novel, Nightmares of Eminent Persons. He found that

• all his characters, when they open their mouths, speak the language of that eminent philosopher, Lord Russell. A passionate young lover says to his love, ‘I begin to think that perhaps we have lived, hitherto, with somewhat too limited preoccupations.’ Such talk creaks. And Russell is always using his characters to score points. But then after all, what does one want of a philosopher? The points are generally sound ones, wittily put; and at times they go to the heart of the matter.”

Dr. Eric Walther recalls that at Yale around 1960,

Mr. Brand Blanshard (I say "Mr." to myself because at Yale in the late 1950's everybody, from students to instructors to the most eminent of Distinguished Professors, was addressed as "Mister") was the perfect exemplar of rationalism and idealism. He would listen to a categorical denunciation of his views and respond with a perfectly calm and reflective rumination. He was a master of the argument from "slippery slopes." If you asserted A, he would show that you would then have to assert B, and then C, and then be so far down the "slippery slope" that you would have to assert D, then E, and eventually the totally absurd F. We philosophy students all believed that the absolute idealism he espoused was ridiculous, but he remained serenely comfortable in defending it as the only position that a truly rational thinker could accept. Of course we often referred to him (quite unjustly) as "Bland Branshard." His criticisms of our arguments as being "unclear" were notorious, and we formulated this catechism of the Blanshard value system: "It's all perfectly simple: Pleasure is better than Pain; Virtue, better than Vice; and Clarity, better than Truth."

Dr. Paul Edwards wrote of Blanshard,

• A professor of philosophy at Yale University, Blanshard is one of the most distinguished contemporary American philosophers. His main work is The Nature of Thought, published in two volumes in 1939, which contains a detailed defense and restatement of idealistic theories while fully taking into account the work of recent opponents of idealism. Unlike many of the other great figures in his tradition, Blanshard is a master of lucid English prose. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Theological Society. In 1952 and 1953 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews in Scotland.

Blanshard’s fullest statement as to his philosophic outlook is found in his The Nature of Thought (1939). In 1954, he wrote On Philosophical Style and in 1962 Reason and Belief. Often classified as an “idealist,” he preferred the term “rationalist.”

Open Court's Library of Living Philosophers, which now numbers 31 volumes, devoted its Volume 13 entirely to Blanshard. The work contains his replies and an autobiography.

"I don't think he spent much effort propounding atheism," Ruth Millikan has written. "Indeed, he was the informal leader of the Friends Meeting in the town of Swarthmore for many many years where he taught at the college from the early 1920s until 1945, when he went to Yale. I think it was theology he opposed more than religion more broadly."

Blanshard once wrote,

• If the nose of rationalism is once admitted under one’s tent, a large and formidable camel is soon likely to follow the nose.

Major Works

The Nature of Thought (1939, 2 volumes)

Reason and Goodness (1961)

Reason and Analysis (1962, The Paul Carus lectures, 12th series)

Reason and Belief (1974)

Four Reasonable Men (1984) - His last work, it contains biographical accounts of four exemplars of the rational temper: Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, and Henry Sidgwick.

Correspondence

Brand Blanshard reviewed books for The Humanist. He reviewed Bertrand Russell's Nightmares of Eminent Persons, for example.