Edgar Sheffield Brlghtman

Background

Brlghtman, Edgar Sheffield was born on September 20, 1884 in Holbrook, Massachusetts, United States.

Education

Brown University, AB 1906, AM 1908. Universities of Berlin and Marburg, 1910-1911. Boston University, STB 1910, PhD 1912.

Career

1906-1908, Assistant in Philosophy and Greek, Brown University. 1912-1915, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, Wesleyan University, Nebraska. 1915-1919, Associate Professor to Professor, Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

1919-1953, Professor, Boston University.

Views

Brightman came to philosophy through religion, w'th expertise in the field of Biblical scholarship, evident in his first book, The Sources of the Hexateuch. He won his greatest fame, however, as a leading exponent of personalism in philosophy. As B°rden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) had founded Personalism, a form of pluralistic idealism, at Boston University, it was fit that Brightman was aPpointed to a Chair that memorialized Bowne there. Brightman’s philosophy centred on three main topics: persons, values and God. Like Bowne, he oHd that human personality is the key to the understanding of reality, and in the elaboration of nis theories he drew upon the resources in British and German idealism. Further, he strove to engage in concrete thinking, relating the most nbstract and universal categories to personal exPeriences in the present. Brightman’s own experience as a young man in t le presence of his first wife’s early death was the crisis that impelled him to rethink the concept of G°d. The upshot was his most original contribuhon to philosophy his concept of God as finite. Although Brightman, like other personalists, considered religion to be central to human life and esteemed God to be a person not a metaphysical abstraction. he related these personalistic principles to value-centric situations, requiring that every admissible philosophical or theological conception be empirically coherent. Unable to explain away occurrences of evil, such as his young wife’s death, or to attribute them to human responsibility, he broke with orthodox belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnificent God. He Proposed instead the theory of a finite God. Thus ne described God as ‘a person supremely conscious, supremely valuable, and supremely creabve, yet limited by both the free choices of other Persons and by restrictions within his own nature’ H930, p. IB).

Interests

• Philosophy of religion.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Berkeley, Hegel and Bowne.