Percy Brand Blanshard (August 27, 1892 – November 19, 1987) was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.
Blanshard was born in Fredericksburg, Ohio. His parents were Francis, a Congregational minister, and Emily Coulter Blanshard, both Canadians by birth an...
more
Percy Brand Blanshard (August 27, 1892 – November 19, 1987) was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.
Blanshard was born in Fredericksburg, Ohio. His parents were Francis, a Congregational minister, and Emily Coulter Blanshard, both Canadians by birth and naturalized American citizens. The freethinker and sometime The Nation editor Paul Beecher Blanshard was his fraternal twin. In 1893, after his mother's death in a Toronto fire started by a kerosene lamp accident, the family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then, in 1899, to Edinburg, Ohio. Upon being diagnosed with tuberculosis, his father was advised to seek the drier climate of the American West. Hence, in 1902, the family moved again, first to Helena, Montana, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Francis died in 1904.
The...
less