Word: blanshard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Before such chilling views took hold, philosophers always were men who thought, says Yale's Professor Emeritus Brand Blanshard, that "they could sit down in their studies and arrive by reasoning at a knowledge of the ultimate nature of the world." Perhaps in no other age had philosophers greater confidence in their capacity to do this than in the 19th century. Hegel tried to encompass all aspects of life within his dialectical logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in 18 ponderous tomes. His idealistic principle that the material world exists only in relation to the Absolute mind...
This practical reason can only be understood, Blanshard claimed, "if we take off the distorting spectacles of technological advance." Tracing the development of various ethical systems from their Greek and Judaic sources, he noted that a conflict between reason and feeling has constantly plagued philosophy. Clarks versus Shaftesbury, Hume versus Kant, and, more recently, the emotivists and imperativists versus the deontologists--all represent in their ethical controversies a form of the basic reason-feeling conflict...
...must leave emotivism and its more pallid linguistic legatees behind," Blanshard said. A rational defense of a way of life lies in showing that it produces more good than the alternative. Yet, reason without enjoyment is valueless...
Seeking a synthesis rather than mere agglomeration, Blanshard suggested two attributes which make a possession "good": the fulfillment of impulse and the satisfaction attending fulfillment. In such a system the categorical imperative still has meaning...
...trouble with U.S. Catholic colleges is an "abysmal mediocrity" that has made them "almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership" in U.S. life. These words were spoken neither by Paul Blanshard nor by any other Catholic baiter-though some Catholics greeted them as if they were-but by a man who cares deeply about the fate of Catholic education: the Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame...