Background
Campbell, Charles Arthur was born on January 13, 1897 in Glasgow.
Campbell, Charles Arthur was born on January 13, 1897 in Glasgow.
University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.
1924-1932, Assistant, then Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Glasgow. 1932-1938, Professor of Philosophy, University College of North Wales, Bangor. 1938-1961. Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow.
Educated at Britain's leading idealist seminaries, Contemporary Authors. Campbell offered in his first book a development of a principle of Bradley's, that the Absolute is beyond all relations and so beyond rational knowledge. Although he originally held that the ‘suprarational’ Absolute ‘must remain °Paque to the categories of the intellect’, he was attracted by Otto’s doctrine of the numinous. In his Gifford Lectures, he sought to defend a symbolical knowledge of God. Although Campbell wrote only two substantial books, he was the author of several influential articles and was much respected by his students, who included H. D. Lewis and Macquarrie. He sought to work out a constructive idealism and to counter the critiques of empiricism and linguistic analysis. He was a prominent defender of the coherence theory, of a substantial self and of libertarianism at a time when these doctrines were commonly assumed to be indefensible. According to Lewis, ‘Campbell.. has presented what is far and away the best case we have in our time. Perhaps at any time, for a genuinely open freedom °f choice, combined with penetrating criticism of freedom as self-determination’.