Career
He also taught, over the years, at Dundee, Dublin, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
Charlie Dunbar
He also taught, over the years, at Dundee, Dublin, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
Broad stressed as basic the distinction between critical and speculative philosophy, which he held to be distinct subjects requiring different methods of investigation. He maintained that the main task of critical philosophy is to clarify the meanings of such general concepts as cause, change, place, and thing. These are constantly used in ordinary life and in science, but nowhere, except in philosophy, do they constitute an explicit subject matter of investigation. Our ordinary understanding of such concepts is "highly confused," as shown by the fact that when we consider them in somewhat unusual situations, we do not know whether to apply them or not. Thus, though we know the ordinary use of "place," we are puzzled by the question, "In what place is the mirror image of a pin?" It is the concern of critical philosophy to make the meanings of such words clear by analysis and definition. Critical philosophy also subjects to criticism such fundamental assumptions of the sciences as the assumption that every change has a cause.
The endeavor of speculative philosophy is more ambitious. It is to construct a theory of the universe that will do justice both to the results of the various sciences and to the implications of our moral and religious experience. Broad's skeptical temper, his fondness for precision in thought and writing, and his demand for careful verification turned his interest from the problems of speculative to those of critical philosophy. On these latter problems he produced a series of remarkably lucid books, among which are Perception, Physics, and Reality (1914), The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (Vol. I, 1933; Vol. II, 1938), a book of essays, Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952), and Lectures on Psychical Research (1963). In 1960 The Philosophy of C. D. Broad was added to The Library of Living Philosophers. It contains 21 essays by leading philosophers on Broad's work, together with his autobiography and his "Reply" to his critics.