C. D. Broad

From Philosopedia

Broad, C(harlie) D(unbar) (30 December 1887 - 11 March 1971)

Broad, an atheist, has been called by A. J. Ayer one of the two most important Cambridge philosophers of the century. The other was J. E. Mc Taggart.

Born in London, he was educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge University, at the latter school of which he taught philosophy startig in 1933. From 1935 to 1958 he was President of the Society of Psychical Research.

Broad's works include Perception, Physics and Reality (1913); Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930); Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952); and Induction, Probability and Causation (1968).

Paul A. Schilpp’s The Philosophy of C. D. Broad (1959) contains critical essays on some of Broad’s views, along with Broad’s replies.

Described as being judicious and witty, Broad went about classifying all possible answers to some carefully clarified questions, weighed the pros and cons of each, then made a tentative suggestion for the most plausible. In perception, he held, we are presented with sensa, whose occurrence is the effect of events in the brain in virtue of a peculiar kind of causation, that these sensa are not literally spatio-temporal parts of the perceived objects but provide literally true information about their spatio-temporal character and relations, and that physical objects must also have other characteristics which provide their qualitative filling.

Biography by Dr. Paul Edwards

Broad was the Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. He is also President of the Society for Psychical Research. Broad has had a great influence on contemporary philosophers both in Britain and in the United States, perhaps second only to that of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein.

He is the author of the following works: Perception, Physics, and Reality (1913), Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), An Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (1933 and 1938), Ethics and the History of Philosophy)1952, and Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research (1953).

{T. L. S. Sprigge, OCP}