Background
Leighton, Joseph Alexander was born on December 2, 1870 in Orangeville, Ontario.
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Joseph Alexander Leighton
Edit ProfileEducation
Trinity College, Toronto, and Cornell University, PhD 1894. Also studied at an Episcopal (Anglican) theological seminary, and in 1896-1897 in Germany in Berlin, Tubingen and Erlingen.
Career
Taught at Hobart College in upstate New York, 18971910. Professor and Head of Department of Philosophy. Ohio State University, Columbus, 1910 41.
Views
Leighton was a personal idealist. He had been a pupil and friend of James Edwin Creighton and was strongly influenced by the Cornell School of idealists but even more by George Holmes Howison and by the philosophers who comprised the ‘personalist' movement. He insisted that he could not accept Creighton’s ‘timeless absolute' and argued that the universe is an organic whole but that it has real constituents which are ‘active individual wholes’. Although he put his case in metaphysical terms, his interests were oriented towards problems of value and it was for this reason that he complained of the ‘apparent indifference’ of absolute idealists to the ‘uniqueness and value of the individual person’. He insisted, however, that individuals must be understood in the context of a community. His own views are succinctly summarized in his essay in Adams and Montague (1930). They are discussed sympathetically in Howie and Burford (1975).
