Background
Blewett, George John was born on December 9, 1873 in St Thomas, Ontario.
Blewett, George John was born on December 9, 1873 in St Thomas, Ontario.
Universities of Toronto, Oxford, Wurzburg and Harvard.
Blewett was strongly influenced by Josiah Royce and Edward Caird, but went his own way in important respects. His experiences in the Canadian west convinced him that the natural Canadian environment was very fragile, and he tried to develop a view of nature which lay between the romantic notion of a perfect nature created by God and the pragmatic view that nature exists for us to do with as we please. He insisted that nature is something towards which we have duties and that these duties consist in developing it in a harmonious way while maintaining as much variety as is consistent with the maintenance of basic social values necessary for human survival and intellectual development. His own strongest interest was in the development of rational religion, and he attempted to create an idealism which would permit an integration of God and the world. He thus had strong interests in Spinoza and in John the Scot. But his concern with religious peace and order in the Canadian situation caused him to pay sympathetic attention to Catholic philosophers including Aquinas and Newman.