Background
Creighton, James Edwin was born on April 8, 1861 in Pictou, Nova Scotia.
Creighton, James Edwin was born on April 8, 1861 in Pictou, Nova Scotia.
Dalhousic University. Halifax, Nova Scotia. Universities of Leipzig and Berlin.
PhD, Cornell University.
He was early influenced by Kant, Bradley and Bosanquet, and later accepted some of the views of Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, without sharing all of their opinions. Creighton differentiated between what he considered as intelligible in philosophy and what is intelligible in the natural sciences. Creighton (1902) was the founding president of the American Philosophical Association.
His most important essays were compiled in Studies in Speculative Philosophy (Creighton, 1925.
See also Sabine, 1917).
Apart from his logic text, Creighton’s writings are fragmentary. He exerted his influence chiefly through the Philosophical Review, the Cornell philosophy department and the fledgling American Philosophical Association. His logic book, although intended as an introduction, discusses and clarifies some of the central issues in idealist logic. It also contains the interesting suggestion that the forms of development found in biological evolution can be applied to inference processes in such a way as to develop a model of the growth of knowledge. Creighton’s philosophical writings are generally dominated by two ideas which mapped out his main interests: first, he believed that the history of philosophy is a part of philosophy itself and. second, he believed that philosophy is a social not an individual process. He was fascinated by the concept of the concrete universal, although his approaches to it from various angles seem incomplete. Although he tended to remain an absolute idealist, he was willing to concede that the various special sciences need to develop individually and not merely in the context of a single unified notion of knowledge. His interest in the history of philosophy led him to translate a number of works, and sustained his lifelong interest in Kant. Although he was revered as a teacher, the tensions in his own thought contributed to the tendency for a number of his pupils to become personal rather than absolute idealists. A friend and protege of Jacob Gould Schurman, he shows Schurman’s influence. His passion for the history of philosophy is a passion which came to dominate Canadian philosophy in the generation which succeeded him. He figures chiefly in accounts of American philosophy as the first President of the American Philosophical Association and as one of those who, along with Schurman, played a significant part in the professionalization of philosophy in North America.
American Philosophical Association.