Edwin Arthur Burtt
From Philosopedia
Burtt, Edwin Arthur (1892—1989)
A philosopher, Burtt during the 1950s was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I and wrote for The Humanist.
Burtt was educated at Yale University, the Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia University, and in 1941 he joined Cornell University's philosophy department.
Writing of Jesus, Burtt mentioned that Jesus’s theory of the world is supernatural and
- is squarely opposed to the scientific naturalism that a frank assessment of experience increasingly compels modern men to accept.
Jesus, he found, had
- no appreciation of the value of intelligence as the most dependable human faculty for analyzing the perplexities into which men fall and for providing wise guidance in dealing with them. . . . Jesus took entirely for granted and without criticism the economic structure prevalent in his day, with its assumption of an absolute right on the part of employers to make such profits as they are able and to treat their workmen according to whatever whim may seize them. Those who work but an hour in the evening may be rightfully paid the same wage as those who have toiled through the long heat of the day, if the employer so will. In fact, God’s relations with men are often compared with those of a haughty and capricious employer with his workmen; he is master of body and soul, and may properly do with them, in time and eternity, whatever it may please him to do. He is subject to no standard of right beyond his own arbitrary will. (Mark 12: 14-17; Matthew 20: 1-16.) Of course, Jesus believed that God is kindly disposed toward those men who turn to him in sincere repentance.
Burtt's considerable influence upon the early humanist movement has been described by Edwin H. Wilson in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995). Bragg commented in 1933 about one draft,
- It seems to me that a natural reading of this statement would assume that it commits itself to a particular theory of naturalism, excluding all other naturalisms such as the Aristotelian, which would allow a certain metaphysical reality to teleological relations, irreducible to casual connections of the material and genetic types. It would assume that the humanism denies the reality and religious value of all entities transcending human experiences, whereas, if I have read my humanist friends correctly, all that they mean to insist upon as essential is that if such entities are accepted their meaning and value for us may be constructed in terms derived solely from human experience. It would assume that humanism denies the legitimacy of carrying over terms (such as God) from the older religious framework, whereas all that is needful to insist upon is that if these terms are carried over they must be fully and honestly reinterpreted in terms consistent with scientific truth and shareable human values.
Burtt, in Types of Religious Philosophy (1939), placed religious humanism in a broad setting, comparing Bertrand Russell’s humanism with that of Roy Wood Sellars’s in The Next Step in Religion. According to Wilson, Burtt contrasted Sellars’s realistic humanism with pragmatic humanism. Burtt, from 1964 to 1965, was one of the Presidents of the American Philosophical Association.
Works
- The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. A Historical and Critical Essay (1925)
- The Metaphysics of Sir Isaac Newton (1925)
- Religion In An Age Of Science (1930)
- Principles and Problems of Right Thinking (1931)
- The English Philosophers, from Bacon to Mill (1939)
- Types Of Religious Philosophy (1939)
- The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (1955)
- Man Seeks the Divine: A Study in the History and Comparison of Religions (1957)
- In Search Of Philosophic Understanding (1965)
Correspondence
Burtt sometimes reviewed books in the 1950s for The Humanist.
