Brand Blanshard's "Reason and Belief"Reason and Belief. Brand Blanshard

Abstract

Brand Blanshard, now the grand old man of American philosophy, stands in a notable succession of humane rationalists or philosophical humanists which includes such figures as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. The present volume, completing a large-scale trilogy presenting Blanshard's philosophy as a whole, formulates his views on religion. I shall want to offer a number of criticisms of the book-mostly to the effect that his targets are often not the right ones to shoot at today-but I want even more to recommend the book strongly to the attention of all concerned with the problem of religion and most particularly to those working in the field of Christian doctrine. For Blanshard's book, old-fashioned though it is in some respects, is nevertheless splendid medicine for a perennial theological distemper: the tendency to accept all manner of inadequate reasoning, bad morals, and prejudiced historical judgments, as long as they are enveloped in clouds of religious rhetoric.