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Brand Blanshard
(27 Aug 1892 - 19 Nov 1987)
American philosopher , following somewhat the tradition of British idealist philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet and Francis Bradley.
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Science Quotes by Brand Blanshard (5 quotes)
…reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature of Thought (1921), Vol II, 264.
As the race has advanced from the animal mind to savagery and then to science, the character it has ascribed to the stars, let us say, has undergone the most radical change, but hardly the character of the stars themselves.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature Of Thought Vol. 1 (1921), 425.
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.
— Brand Blanshard
'Reply to Lewis Edwin Hahn', The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (1980), 901.
If science could get rid of consciousness, it would have disposed of the only stumbling block to its universal application.
— Brand Blanshard
'Reply to Francis V. Raab', The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (1980) 807.
Thought, looked at from the inside, is not a mechanical succession of ideas, but a cry for ‘more light’.
— Brand Blanshard
In The Nature Of Thought Vol. 1 (1921), 459.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
