Background
Cunningham, Gustavus Watts was born on November 14, 1881 in Laurens, South Carolina, United States.
Cunningham, Gustavus Watts was born on November 14, 1881 in Laurens, South Carolina, United States.
Cornell University, under James Edwin Creighton, and received his doctorate there in 1908.
1902-1905, taught English at Howard College, Birmingham, Alabama. Taught Philosophy at Middlebury College. 1908 17, at the University of Texas, 1917-1927, and at Cornell, 1927-1949.
Dean of the Cornell Graduate School, 1944-1949. And President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1930, and of the Eastern Division in 1937.
Insisting that meaning requires both an intrinsic and an extrinsic dimension, Cunningham accepted some current critiques of idealism. But he agreed that the object of knowledge cannot be separated completely from the object itself without making knowledge impossible. In The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (1933) he reviews most of the contemporary discussions. The one argument for idealism which he accepts is that any conception of nature without mind becomes unintelligible because it ignores the presupposition that nature is conceivable. Although influenced by James Edwin Creighton he, like J. A. Leighton, rebelled against the idea of the timeless absolute. He was evidently influenced also by various currents of American realism and his interests were mainly in epistemology rather than in ontology. He is described by Andrew Reck as ‘the most creative’ of the Cornell idealists, a group which included James Edwin Creighton and Jacob Gould Schurman. Certainly he did address the specific objections which were brought against idealist philosophy at the time. Sources: Who Was Who in America.