3 Quotes & Sayings By Brand Blanshard

Born in 1885, he studied at Oxford and was a theological lecturer at the London School of Economics. He subsequently taught at Harvard, but returned to England after his marriage to Henrietta Haverfield in 1918. He became a strong advocate of the League of Nations and the League's Permanent Mandate Commission. He served as a member of the Royal Commission on Palestine and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) Read more

He died in 1946.

1
..reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest. . Brand Blanshard
2
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal. Brand Blanshard