Brian Magee spent a year at Yale University where he attended a seminar given by Brand Blanshard on empiricist epistemology. In Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 124, Magee remembers Blanshard:
He was reminiscent of Bertrand Russell in his commitment to rational analysis and argument in forms that did not subordinate them to considerations of language. [. . .]
At first his teaching method struck me as a trifle chilly, but then I realized that it was the first philosophy teaching I had encountered that was not sectarian and excommunicative. The interpretations put on everything by Oxford philosophers had been analogous to the interpretations put on current affairs by active members of the Communist Party: partisan, belligerent, propagandist, intolerant, nakedly self-oriented and one-sided. Blanshard was quite different from this. Although he was himself in opposition to the tradition he was discussing he presented it with an admirable fairness in its relationship to other traditions. [. . .]
At Oxford the assumption has always been that the empiricist tradition was philosophy. There had been one occasion when I had raised a question about the existentialist tradition as represented by philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, only to have it explained to me that these were "not philosophers." Among other things Blanshard's seminar was for me an object-lesson in academic fairness . . . .