Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Blanshard, Brand

  • Latin or Anglo-Saxon?

    Well-written advice on writing well from Brand Blanshard.

  • A Per Impossibile Counterfactual

    It is equally true that if science could get rid of consciousness, it would thereby get rid of itself.

  • Is it Better to Write in Latin or in Anglo-Saxon?

    Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1954), pp. 46-48. I have broken Blanshard’s one paragraph into three. The question has often been canvassed whether it is better to write, in the main, in Latin or Anglo-Saxon. There is no doubt that one’s writing will have a different mood or atmosphere as the…

  • Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

    Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.   The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused toadopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To…

  • Bryan Magee’s Tribute to Brand Blanshard

    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.…

  • What Blanshard Might Have Said to Derrida

    A correspondent reminds me that today is Brand Blanshard's birthday.  Born on 27 August 1892, he died on 19 November 1987.  Here is a line from Blanshard's On Philosophical Style, Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 52-53: Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings. The entire essay is available online here.